Malcolm Gladwell on the American Civil-Rights Movement
In his talk during the 2012 New Yorker Festival, Malcolm Gladwell talks about the power of a single photograph in the civil-rights movement.
Released on 7/29/2013
Good morning, everyone.
It's a pleasure to see you all.
Thank you for coming out,
and being inside on such a lovely day.
I've done an embarrassing number of these talks.
I think I've done them every year
since we've had a festival.
How many actually have been to one of my talks before?
Oh, repeat business.
So, you'll know that I begin every one of these talks
with the same incredibly tired joke,
which is they ask me, all of us,
to tell, to say what we're gonna talk about in May.
And who knows, in May, what you wanna talk about in October?
It's like asking me what I'm gonna be wearing.
It's a ridiculous question.
So, I always make up something,
which I think sounds plausible.
So, I was being pressured by the festival people
to come up with a title back in May,
and I said, Well, you know, the Birmingham Movement,
Martin Luther King's campaign in Birmingham will,
its 50th anniversary is next year.
I'll just say Birmingham 50 Years Later,
and that'll shut them up. (audience laughing)
And then earlier this week, I was like,
Oh, my goodness, I've gotta come up
with something to talk about.
And I thought, You know, the Birmingham Movement
will be 50 years old next year;
maybe I should talk about that.
So, this is, I believe, one of the first times
I will ever talk about what I said I was gonna talk about.
So, this is a moment of truth and transparency for me
that has never been achieved over the past 10 years,
and, so, I'm enormously proud of myself.
And you should be, too.
So, Birmingham, let's talk about Birmingham.
Birmingham, of course, is perhaps the most important
moment in the civil rights struggle.
It is the campaign that marked the turning point
in the battle against Jim Crow in the South.
And King comes to the city in the spring of 1963,
and he begins to orchestrate a series of protests
against the city's policies of segregation.
And it all comes to a climax in the first weekend
of May, 1963.
And King sends hundreds and hundreds of kids,
teenagers and preteens, marching through the streets,
and they are set upon by dogs
under the command of Sheriff Bull Connor,
who was the head of the city's euphemistically named
Commission of Public Safety.
And that confrontation leads,
attracts attention from around the world.
And there is a short path between what happens in Birmingham
in the spring of 1963 and what happened in Congress in 1964
when the Civil Rights Act is passed,
which formally abolishes the rule of Jim Crow
in the American South.
And when the Civil Rights Act is passed in 1964,
it is said, on more than one occasion,
that the seeds of that historic piece of legislation
were planted in the streets of Birmingham one year earlier.
In the list of important events in American history,
this is top two or three.
It's up there with Washington crossing the Delaware,
and other iconic moments in American History.
So, what I wanna talk about this morning
is one of the most iconic photographs
from the Birmingham Campaign.
And if we could have the photograph go up,
this is the photograph I wanna talk about.
It's taken on the Saturday of the campaign
by an AP photographer named Bill Hudson,
Saturday, May 3rd.
It is an extraordinarily powerful photo;
in fact, it's the photo that is associated
perhaps more than any other with the Birmingham Campaign
of Martin Luther King.
And if you look at this photo,
you can see why it's so powerful.
So, if you look closely, the first thing you see
is we have our victim, who is this young man.
He turns out to be 15 years old,
and he's dressed very respectably,
and he is peacefully walking through the streets
of Birmingham protesting on behalf
of a very noble cause.
And then we have, we've got the police officer
in dark glasses with his teeth clenched,
and in a aggressive and hostile position.
And he is letting a German Shepherd bury its fangs
into the stomach of this kid,
this respectable, harmless kid.
And the kid is leaning into the German Shepherd,
and in this kind of passive way.
Someone later said, It's as if he was saying,
Here I am, take me.
Like a martyr.
And he has that look on his face,
that kind of peaceful, passive look on his face,
saying, I'm willing to bear the consequences
of my actions.
If this is what has to happen for me to demonstrate
on behalf of this greater cause, then so be it.
And the AP photographer who chooses to publish
this famous photograph says that he did so
because of, The saintly calm,
those were his words, The saintly calm of the young man.
And the Washington Post editorialized
about this photo the next day that it was about,
it was an archetypal photo of the mal-treated negro youth,
of the true victims of the policy of racism
and Jim Crow in the South.
This is a picture, in other words, that tells a story.
And I think it's possible to be more specific than that;
it tells a perfect story.
It identifies in one single image a villain,
a victim, and a crime.
The villain is Bull Connor, the man who ordered
police dogs to be used against protesters in the streets
And everyone who would have seen this picture in 1963,
would have known exactly who the villain was.
Bull Connor was, by that point,
an extraordinarily well-known figure, public figure
The crime is, of course, the dog bite,
is the fact that a dog is being used against
an innocent kid.
And, remember, in 1963 the image of German Shepherds
attacking people meant something far more powerful
and affecting than it does today.
This was 20 years after the end of the second World War,
and German Shepherds were indelibly associated
with the Nazis in Germany.
They were the symbols, in some sense, of Nazi oppression.
And, so, for these symbols of Nazi oppression
to be repurposed against black people
in the streets of Birmingham was a powerful blow
to people who saw this photograph in 1963.
And then there is our victim;
and the victim is, like I said,
he's this well-dressed, respectable kid,
and kid is crucial here.
He's not someone who is, in any way,
complicit in some larger way with the political situation
in the South.
He's a kid who is chosen to do something really courageous,
and is suffering for his actions.
Now, it is no exaggeration to say that this picture
sets the world on fire.
It's effect is absolutely electric.
It runs across the next day in the Sunday New York Times.
It runs across above the fold, across three columns.
At a time when to be on above the fold
in the Sunday New York Times made a huge impact
on the world.
It was an AP photo that went to hundreds, if not thousands,
of newspapers around the world.
It was the following day.
We know this because we have tapes
from the Kennedy White House.
It was all Kennedy would talk about in the White House.
He was just horrified and shocked by this.
It went to his very core.
And he has a meeting on that Monday after this ran.
He has a meeting with Americans for Democratic Action
in Washington; and that's all they talk about.
It's a previously-scheduled meeting
that's supposed to go over the legislative agenda
for the year, and everyone wants to say,
What are you gonna do?
Dogs are attacking kids in the streets of Birmingham!
And for the first time the president
is really on the defensive about his civil rights position,
and he feels compelled to take a far more activist position.
This photograph is discussed in horrified tones
on the floor of the Senate on that Monday.
Literally, it is topic-one in,
the Secretary of State Dean Rusk
stands up in a press conference,
starts talking about this photo about he thought
this was gonna do irreparable damage to America's reputation
around the world, and provide ammunition
for the Soviet Union in its propaganda battle
against the West.
It's hard to imagine that a single photo
could have that kind of effect, particularly today;
but this one does.
When I say this is an iconic photo,
I mean that it shook American society to its very core
at the time that it was taken.
And the reason is because it tells a perfect story.
Encapsulated in one image is villain, victim, and crime.
Now, I got interested in these kinds of stories
because I'm writing this book,
which, knock on wood, will come out next year,
which you should all buy in triplicate.
And it's called David and Goliath,
and it's a book about how underdogs win.
And, so, I got very interested in stories
because stories are one of the principle means
by which people who are without power become powerful.
And a powerful story is, I think, in many ways,
even more important than all of the material resources
of the advantaged and the powerful.
That in the hands of even someone who seems very weak,
a powerful story like this can give them
the opportunity for victory.
And even the most privileged of opponents,
when confronted with a story as powerful as this,
can lose, can find every one of their advantages
So, what I wanna do this morning is talk about
how this story, I like to call them lethal stories
since the story is lethal as a bullet.
How do lethal stories like this come about?
In particular, how did this lethal story come about?
And I wanna raise two additional questions.
One is that whether a story like this is possible
in the day in age we live today.
And, secondly, I wanna address the fact
that these stories do, and ought to, make us uncomfortable.
And that's something I think we should confront
So, that's the plan.
I wanna walk through villains, crimes, and victims.
So, let's start with the first of those three things,
What is sometimes forgotten about Birmingham
is that Birmingham, the Birmingham movement
starts out of failure.
Before coming to Birmingham in 1963,
King had suffered perhaps the most grievous defeat
of his campaign.
He had just come Albany, Georgia,
200 miles to the south of Atlanta,
and he had been humiliated.
He had been there for a year,
leading up the same kind of protest
that he would lead in Birmingham,
trying to overcome the policies of Jim Crow
and segregation in Albany, and he had come to not.
He had been, the local power structure had proved
They had fought back.
He had had difficulty motivating protesters to join him.
And, in the end, he just kind of, it just fades away,
and King is forced to leave in failure.
And there's all kinds of reasons.
King would go on to discuss at length
what he thinks what he thought went wrong in Albany.
The root was his opponent.
The equivalent of Bull Connor in Albany, Georgia,
who was a man named Laurie Pritchett.
And the root of the problem was that Laurie Pritchett
refused to play the role of villain.
He was, let's be clear, every bit as much
of an unrepentant racist as Bull Connor was.
He was as much a staunch defender
of the status quo in the South.
But Laurie Pritchett wasn't dumb;
he understood the game that King was playing.
And before King comes to Albany,
Laurie Pritchett sits down and reads very carefully
through King's account of the Montgomery Bus Boycott
10 years previously until he gets a sense
of what King's strategy and tactics were.
So, for example, one of the key things that King
tried to do when he led protests,
which was a page he borrowed directly from Mahatma Gandhi,
was that you would overwhelm the local police force
with so many protesters that their jails would become full
to overflowing, and they could no longer deal
with the protest.
The way that you deal with people marching
through your streets if you are someone
trying to defend the racist status quo,
is you lock them up.
You make them go away.
Well, when your jails become full,
you can't lock them up anymore,
and you're forced to confront the protests
on their own turf.
That was what Gandhi did in India,
and that is what King set out to do in the American south.
And Pritchett hears that, he thinks, Oh.
So, he makes deals with all of the surrounding towns
around Albany, and says, Look, if it ever comes to it,
can I bust protesters to your jails?
Will you serve as overflow capacity?
And they say, Yeah.
And, so, he sets that in place.
And King tries to overwhelm the jail system in Albany,
and he fails because of Pritchett.
And, more than that, Pritchett turns out to be
this incredibly nice guy.
All of the reporters who come down from the North
to cover King's great campaign fall in love with him!
He tells them stories, they go drinking with him,
he's really nice, he doesn't seem like a racist at all.
He tells his police officers,
You know what, never ever use undue force.
Don't go, make sure that you behave like gentlemen
when you deal with these protesters.
Let's not do anything that attracts the attention,
or raises the ire of these sensitive, liberal
New York Times reporters coming down
from New York City.
And it works; they all love him.
He at one point, he has King arrested and thrown in jail.
And, of course, that's what King wants.
He wants to be in jail where he can be the martyr.
And Pritchett realizes this,
and he has very quietly King bailed out the next day.
And King is like, Oh!
I wanted to be in jail for a week!
And, no, Pritchett bails him out,
and, so, he's forced to go back into the general population.
The best Pritchett story I have is that Pritchett is,
when King is trying to mount this campaign
in downtown Albany, Pritchett moves into a hotel room
so he could be right next to King
'cause he wants to be in constant dialogue with King.
So, they end up having these endless meetings
day after day, after day, which is not what King wants.
And they become kind of friends
because Pritchett's incredibly charming,
and King's kind of a nice guy.
And they're having this meeting once,
been going on for hours,
and Pritchett's secretary hands him a telegram,
and he reads it and his face falls.
At this point, King knows him so well, he's like,
Laurie, what's wrong?
And he says, It's from my wife.
I haven't been home for three weeks,
and it's our 12th wedding anniversary.
And King turns to him and just says,
and it's the moment that he really declares defeat
in Albany, he says, You know what, go home.
Take your wife out to dinner.
I promise you there will be no protests
until 10 a.m. the next morning.
That was the end of Albany.
You can't lead a protest against that kind of guy,
someone who refuses to play the role of villain.
So, finally, King just gives up,
and he looks around and he says,
I'm trying to build a morality play in the South.
I need someone who will play the lead!
Someone who will play the role of the antihero.
And, so, he leaves Albany in July of 1962,
and he casts his eyes around the South
about who can play the role of villain,
and he lands, of course, on Bull Connor in Birmingham.
Now, Birmingham in the 1960s
is the most racially-divided city in the country.
It is known the Johannesburg of the South;
and that is perhaps an understatement.
When black people tried to move
into even marginally white neighborhoods,
they would routinely, routinely have their homes dynamited.
In fact, there was so much bombing of black houses
in Birmingham that it was,
the other name for Birmingham was Bombingham.
When a busload of Freedom Riders
came into Birmingham in 1961,
the police stood by while a group of Klansmen
pulled the bus off the road, and set it afire
with people in it.
They were crawling out the windows trying to get out.
That's Birmingham; it was a place with a law unto itself.
Diane McWhorter, in this really wonderful book
she wrote about Birmingham called Carry Me Home,
says that, Whenever there was a crime wave in Birmingham,
it was the policy of the police just to go out
and shoot a few suspects.
That was how they did business in Birmingham.
And there are all kinds of jokes about Birmingham
that are really not jokes and here's one.
My favorite is a black man in Chicago wakes up one day,
and tells his wife that he had a dream.
In his dream Jesus told him to go to Birmingham.
And she's totally horrified, his wife,
and she says, Did Jesus say he'd go with you?
And the husband replies,
He said he'd go as far as Memphis.
That's the reputation Birmingham had.
And the man who effectively runs Birmingham
is this guy Bull Connor,
and at the time, in 1963, he's in his late 60s,
and he's this little guy with these big jug ears
and bullfrog voice.
He's short and sort of squat.
And he'd come to prominence when he first was elected
to the euphemistically named Commission of Public Safety.
He was in the 1930s.
And right after his election in 1938,
there was a New Deal conference in downtown Birmingham
at the Municipal Auditorium.
And it was a 1,500 delegates from around the country,
both white and black, had come to this place,
including Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of the president.
And, of course, in 1938 in Birmingham,
there was a segregation statute in the books
that said that blacks and whites could not mix in public.
And there was a real threat that these new dealers,
who were coming to town, were gonna mix.
And, so, Connor stands outside Municipal Auditorium
with a bullhorn, and he says,
and he was full of these kinds of malapropisms,
he starts announcing,
White and black are not to segregate together.
Wait a minute, pardon me,
White and negro are to segregate together.
And he gets so incensed with the possibility
that this might happen,
that he drives a stake into the lawn
in front of the Municipal Auditorium,
and he attaches a rope to it,
and he runs the rope down the center
of the aisle of the auditorium.
And he says, Blacks on one side, whites on the other side.
And Eleanor Roosevelt's on the wrong side.
And he goes up to her and he says, Ma'am,
I don't even know if he said ma'am,
but he says, Ma'am, you have to move.
And she moves.
Can you imagine someone doing that to Michelle Obama today?
That's what Birmingham was like!
You've got these little, short squat guys running around
with jug ears telling the wife
of the President of the United States
where to sit in their auditorium,
and running a rope down the middle of the auditorium.
And Connor would sit, he was there,
he was in power for years in Birmingham,
and he would sit in downtown Birmingham in the hotel,
in the Molton Hotel, and he would do shots
of Old Grand-Dad, 100-proof Old Grand-Dad.
And he would just keep up a constant patter
of outrageous things.
He used to call, he used to say,
A Jew is a nigger turned inside out.
That's standard-issue Bull Connor.
And Pritchett comes to Birmingham when he hears
that King is coming to Birmingham.
And he comes to try and warn Bull Connor
about what's gonna happen 'cause he wants to make sure
that Bull Connor doesn't behave like a fool,
doesn't play the role of villain
as King wants him to do.
And he goes into Connor's office,
and Connor is sitting in this huge chair,
one of like many very powerful, short men,
he likes to sit in enormous chairs.
And Pritchett's trying to explain to him
what's gonna happen.
This master tactician is coming to town,
and is trying to play him.
And Connor swivels in his chair,
and looks out the window,
and starts to talk about how the federal government
tried to force him to integrate
the city's public golf courses.
And his response was to concrete-in all the holes
so no one could play.
And Pritchett realizes it's not gonna work.
This guy is gonna be, King's gonna play him like a fiddle,
and that's exactly what happens.
So, what does King need next?
Well, he has his villain; well, now he needs his victims.
He needs to have the perfect victim.
And who is the perfect victim?
Well, children, of course.
King is working with a guy named James Bevel.
And James Bevel has been, he was a famous figure
in the Civil Rights Movement.
This tall, striking bald guy, who for reasons
no one has ever been able to explain to me,
always wore a yarmulke, even though he was not Jewish.
And he would always wear a bib overalls,
and my favorite description of him is that he was a,
he was a little eccentric.
He claimed to hear voices, and he was all these kind,
my favorite description of him is he was a militant
out of Dr. Seuss. (audience laughing)
Anyway, Bevel was the guy who was responsible
for dealing with the children,
for educating the children and the teenagers of Birmingham.
As the campaign starts to escalate against Bull Connor,
King decides it's time to deploy the children;
and they're gonna be his ultimate weapon.
So, he turns to Bevel, and Bevel starts to round up
the kids who he has been working with for some time,
and training, and getting them used to the,
teaching them about the principles
of non-violent resistance, and on and on.
And they call the day that they're first gonna use
the kids in the protest D Day.
And Bevel goes out, and he drops leaflets
in all of the schools around the city, and says,
Come to 16th Street Baptist Church.
Which is wear King was headquartered.
At noon on Thursday, don't ask permission.
And he gets the city's most popular DJ,
a guy named Shelley the Playboy Stewart,
to do these coded instructions over the course of the day
to all the kids 'cause, of course, all the kids
are listening to this guy.
And he says, Kids, there's gonna be a party at the park.
Bring your toothbrushes.
Which is code for you're probably gonna go to jail,
so make sure you've got some toothbrushes
to brush your teeth, and anything else you wanna use,
you wanna take with you into the jail.
And the FBI gets wind of the plan,
and warns Bull Connor and says,
Look, Bull, you gotta go out and tell those kids
that anyone who goes to 16th Street Baptist Church
tomorrow, on Thursday rather,
is gonna be expelled from school.
And he warns them, and the kids don't care.
And they show up, they open the doors
to 16th Street Baptist Church on Thursday at one o'clock,
and the kids start streaming in from all around the city.
Later that afternoon, King and his lieutenants start,
particularly a guy named Wyatt Walker,
who was the great strategist of King's campaign,
start releasing the kids a dozen at a time.
And they're all holding signs like, Freedom!
Or, I'll die to make this land my home.
And they're singing We Shall Overcome.
Bull Connor has got the paddy wagons lined up.
And the kids stop in front of the paddy wagons,
and they say prayers, or they sing the song,
and then they're lined up,
and they're arrested and put in these paddy wagons,
and driven away.
And then another dozen come out,
and they sing, and they're arrested,
and they're driven away.
And then another dozen, and another dozen,
and another dozen.
And, at one point, a police officer turns
to one of King's lieutenants and says,
How many kids do you have in there?
And he says, Oh, I don't know, maybe a thousand.
And the police officer says, Oh, my God.
'Cause they're realizing the extent
of what is about to happen.
By midafternoon there are 600 kids in jail.
And then the next day, D Day Two,
they start all over again,
and this time 1,500 kids come down.
And they skip school, and come down
to 16th Street Baptist Church.
And word has got out in Birmingham
about what's going on, and thousands of people converge
on Ingram Park, which is the park right next
to 16th Street Church.
And reporters come, and photographers, and cameramen.
And Connor is totally stunned now
because his jail is filling up.
Pritchett tried to warn him and he wouldn't listen,
but he only has so many jail cells in Birmingham.
And, believe me, King knows exactly how many people
he can put behind bars, and now he's getting overwhelmed.
And then what happens on Saturday?
The kids come back, again!
Even more of them!
And they come out, and now the jails are full.
And what does Connor do?
The first thing he does is he brings in
the fire department, and he says,
Make sure those marchers
don't crossover into white Birmingham!
White Birmingham was an area just to the other side
of the park.
They start turning on these high-pressure hoses
to prevent the kids from marching any further.
And those are the famous photographs you've all seen
of the kids being, the shirts were torn off their back,
and they were sent spinning down the street
like tumbleweeds, and they were thrown
up against the side of buildings.
'Cause these are fire hoses turned up
to their maximum capacity.
And that stops the kids cold,
but then King and his people realize,
Oh, they've only got so many firetrucks.
So, they send the kids in another direction,
and that's when King, that's when Bull Connor panics,
and he brings out the K9 units.
Eight K9 units, big German Shepherds.
And one of those German Shepherds goes up to that kid
in that photograph, in that moment, and lunges at him.
And there's a photographer right there,
and takes the photo, and the photo goes around the world;
and that is the beginning of the end of Jim Crow.
Villain, victim, crime.
Now, why is King so obsessed with telling a story?
Where does this notion come from
that what he really should be doing in Birmingham
is constructing this kind of narrative?
Well, the answer is simple; he doesn't have any choice.
It's really important, I think, to understand
the predicament that he was in in 1963.
He doesn't have any money, he never really had much money,
but he really doesn't have any money.
Albany had been a tremendous blow to the fortunes
of the Civil Rights Movement.
He's in trouble with his own community;
in fact, there's a great a deal of dissension
within the ranks of the black Civil Rights Movement
over King's leadership.
In Albany, some of his fellow civil rights activists
took to calling King De Lawd because he was,
they said, He was this figure who stayed out of the fray,
and would just parachute in at the last moment,
and not get his feet wet in any of the protests.
So, this is an undercurrent of real growing discomfort
with his title of leadership.
And, more than that, it's been a very long time
since the Civil Rights Movement had had a real victory.
If you think about it, in 1963 the greatest victory
they had ever had was the desegregation decision
by the Supreme Court in 1954,
Brown versus Board of Education.
But do you know how many black school children
in the deep southern states of Alabama, Mississippi,
and South Carolina in 1964, nine, '63,
nine years after Brown.
Do you know how many black kids were in integrated schools?
The biggest victory they had ever won,
and it hadn't had a single effect on the areas
they were trying to desegregate.
And, more than that, even more important
was the political complexion of the South in those years.
If you were in the South in the early 1950s,
it was possible to be optimistic about the direction
of southern racial politics.
Virtually all of the states, the southern states
in the early 50s had racially-moderate governors.
Alabama, the governor of Alabama in the 1950s, early 50s,
was Big Jim Folsom, who was a populist.
He was a guy who was fond of saying of black people,
that, A black man was a man like any other.
He was famous, or infamous in that world,
for going up to black people in the street
and shaking their hands.
He would touch them!
And that trend was, if you look through all the Arkansas,
and the Carolinas, all of those states in the early 1950s
were tentatively and slowly, but nonetheless clearly,
moving in a radically-moderate direction.
Even Birmingham in the early 1950s seemed to be mellowing.
Bull Connor had been cast out of office.
He was considered to be an embarrassment to the city.
They had set up an interracial committee
to try and bring about progress.
They had desegregated their elevators,
which sounds ridiculous, but that was a big deal
in Birmingham in the early 1950s.
They even set aside their city's segregation ordinance
because they wanted the Brooklyn Dodgers
to come and play an exhibition game in Birmingham Stadium.
And, of course, the Brooklyn Dodgers had Jackie Robinson;
so you had to change the law if you wanted
to bring in the Dodgers.
That's the kind of trajectory that Birmingham,
along with the rest of the South,
was on in the early 50s;
and if you looked at, you would say,
Maybe there's hope here.
But then it had all changed.
After Brown, politics in the South took a vicious turn
to the right.
And one by one, all those were moderates were replaced
by people, by hardened racists.
George Wallace took over from Big Jim Folsom.
And in Birmingham what happened
was that Bull Connor came back into power,
worse than ever.
So, these were difficult times.
And, so, when King comes to Birmingham,
he's not coming pursuing some kind of whimsical notion
of a great story; he's coming with a heavy heart,
and with a real sense of desperation.
He's just failed in Albany.
Things are falling apart.
This is his last stand.
And then there's the question of the perfect victims,
Let's be clear, King did not wanna use children;
nobody wanted to use children.
The reason was simple.
Birmingham was an incredibly dangerous place.
It was a place where, it was Bombingham!
It was a place where the Ku Klux Klan was running free.
Where it was standard issue for if any black family
was deemed to be so uppity
as to move into a white neighborhood,
they would simply dynamite their home.
Fred Shuttlesworth who was the minister
at 16th Street Baptist Church,
and one of the most prominent activists in the city,
had his home blown up when they got there.
The Freedom Riders got pulled off the,
got their bus burned on fire.
And then when they finally arrived at the bus station,
they got beaten up, while the cops just sat there
King's own brother had his house blown up.
The first meeting that King has when he comes to Birmingham,
he goes around the room to all of his trusted lieutenants
and he gives each person, delivers each person
a kind of mock eulogy.
And in the meaning of what he's saying is clear,
is that he didn't expect them all to survive
that time in Birmingham.
One of the first speeches he gives
at 16th Street Baptist Church,
this enormous, 200-pound Nazi strides down the aisle,
walks up on stage, and just starts pummeling King
in the face with his fists.
It's actually one of the most extraordinary moments
in King's career 'cause you know what King does?
Is, once he realizes what's happened,
and the people descend and try to wrestle this man off,
King covers his assailant with his body
so people can't beat him up.
And he whispers to him, and says,
You're not gonna win this battle;
We're gonna win and I love you.
And he lifts the man up and holds his arm up like this
before all of the audience, and says,
This man is a brother.
It's an incredible moment in the history
of the Civil Rights Movement.
It is emblematic of just how dangerous,
physically dangerous, what these guys are doing.
And, at the same time, the campaign that...
That he's going through is proving
to be incredibly controversial.
People are attacking him from all sides.
The adults are, many of the conservative black newspapers
have turned against King at that point,
saying that this is just not working.
So, that's the situation, again, the only reason
that he turns to children in that critical moment
is that he's got no choice because the standard campaign
he tried to run with adults had proved to be
an incredible failure.
Like I said, the black newspapers had turned against him,
he had run low on money.
Bull Connor would sit in the Molton Hotel and say,
King's gonna run out of niggers.
And that was true; he had run out of people
who wanted to march with him by late April of 1963.
When he gets out of jail in April of '63,
and he goes and stands and gives a sermon
with 700 people in attendance,
nine people agreed to march with him the next day
out of 700.
That's how discredited what he was doing was at that point.
It was dangerous to march with him.
You would lose your job if you're white boss
saw you marching with Martin Luther King.
People didn't wanna do it.
And the next day Andrew Young gets up
and repeats the same thing, desperate,
Please, people, come and volunteer with us.
He gets seven people to come and join us.
King's at wit's end.
And he turns to the kids because the kids
are the only people who will show up.
They're the ones who have nothing to lose;
they don't have jobs that they can be fired from.
And he comes under incredible criticism for this.
He is denounced on the floor of Congress,
he's denounced by the major of Birmingham.
The judge who starts arresting the kids
after the first day of protests basically says that,
King is as bad as Connor.
It is as bad to send these kids in harm's way
as it is to arrest them and turn on them with fire hoses.
Malcolm X, my namesake,
Malcolm X says of Martin Luther King that,
Real men don't put children on the firing line.
He thinks it's a copout to use kids.
The New York Times editorializes against King,
and says, You can't put kids in that position.
How dare you use them as scapegoats
in the battle for racial justice.
The Attorney General of the United States at that time,
Robert Kennedy, stands up and basically says,
It is a dangerous and perilous business
to use kids in this particular battle.
The minute one kid gets injured,
that is a too high a price to pay
for battling for civil rights in the South.
The consensus was that King was doing something outrageous
in using kids.
And then there were the parents.
There were all these kids that he was using in these marches
and they were getting arrested,
and each one of them had a parent.
And they knew the dangers of,
they knew full-well the dangers of being a black person
How would you feel if someone tried to convince your kids,
in many cases, preteens, kids as young as six,
and seven, and eight,
to skip school at the risk of being expelled,
and then do battle with this crazy racist
who's doing shots every morning at a hotel downtown,
and is sicking dogs and fire hoses on your kids?
But King does it, why?
Because he doesn't have any choice.
Because he understands he needs that.
That's the only way he can win this battle.
And to give that, he doesn't just need the police officer
and the dog; he needs the kid.
And King gives his speech on the Friday night,
the Friday night before the picture is taken
at 16th Street Baptist Church.
And all the parents are in the audience,
all the parents of the kids who had been arrested that day.
And they know what's been going on.
Some of their kids are being held downtown in a prison.
75 to a cell; and the cells are built
for five or six people.
And the other kids are being held at a stockade,
a makeshift stockade established at the camp fairgrounds.
And it's pouring rain,
and they've been without food and water for hours.
And King gives his speech, and you understand
if you read the speech how desperately
he's trying to keep this whole thing together
'cause he knows that all that has to happen,
if one parent stands up and says, Enough.
Then everything crumbles.
And he says, he's talking of the dogs and he goes,
And the dogs, well, I'll tell you when I was growing up,
I was dog bitten for nothing.
So, I don't mind being bitten by a dog
for standing up for freedom.
He's trying to make light of this!
Trying to say, Don't worry about this.
He goes on, Now, about your children.
Your daughters and sons are in jail, many of them,
and I'm sure many of the parents are here tonight.
Don't worry about them.
They're suffering for what they believe,
and they're suffering to make this nation
a better nation.
Don't worry about them.
Your eight year old is in a stockade
at the camp fairgrounds,
surrounded by these crazy, racist cops,
who shoot suspects when the crime wave gets out of control,
and you're not supposed to worry?
Taylor Branch and his history of the Civil Rights Movement
says that there were legitimate,
there were rumors, many of them legitimate,
about rats, beatings, concrete beds,
overflowing latrines, jailhouse assaults,
and crude examinations for a venereal disease.
That's what those parents were hearing about their kids
They are upset.
And what's King doing?
He's spinning, and said, Oh, don't worry about them.
And then he says, Jail helps you rise above
the miasma of everyday life. (audience laughing)
If they want some books, Books!
If they want some books, we'll get them books.
I catch up on my reading every time I go to jail.
Like I said, he's desperate.
These are the words of a guy who's got one arrow left
in his quiver.
He's got one shot.
He's gotta keep this whole thing together
long enough to get that picture.
Why is he so concerned about that picture?
Because he understands how powerful that picture can be.
His mind's eye, he knows if he can get that,
he can win against even the most extraordinary
and powerful foe.
Think about what the precursor to that photo was.
There was a photo that played an exactly analogous role
in the Civil Rights Movement 10 years earlier;
and it's the famous photo, I'm sure you've all seen,
taken in 1955 of Emmett Till.
Emmett Till was the young black kid from Chicago
who goes down to visit his relatives in Mississippi,
and either talks to, or whistles at,
or does something to a white woman, a white girl,
because in Chicago you do that.
And that night the family of the girl come looking for him,
and they beat him to a pulp and put a bullet in his head,
and throw 'em in the Tallahatchie River.
And the body is fished out two days later by a fisherman,
and the local sheriff there tries to bury the body
as soon as he can; but Emmett Till's mother says, No.
Bring the body back to Chicago.
And she dresses her son's corpse in a suit and tie,
and she lies him in the casket,
and she has someone take a picture.
And that picture is a, you see it,
it's a kid in a suit and tie,
and his tongue is distended and nose is flattened,
and one eye is gone and the other eye
is out of its socket, and one ear is torn off,
and there's a bullet hole right here.
And that photo goes around the world,
and around the black community,
and it inspires an entire generation of activists.
Half the people who came to Birmingham
were people who became emboldened
in the Civil Rights Movement
by that picture of Emmett Till,
an innocent kid who got brutalized by racists in the South.
King wants that.
He wants the same power of that Emmett Till photograph
to aid his cause in Birmingham.
He wants, just like that photo had,
he wants villain, victim, and crime.
So, let's go back to this photo for a moment.
It is a staged photo, in a sense.
Now, I don't mean staged in the same sense
as the famous Mathew Brady photos of the Civil War,
where, remember, he would line up the corpses
in the most kind of dramatic fashion.
He would, actually, physically move things around
to make for the most powerful photo.
I don't mean staged like that;
but what I mean is that that photo is the result,
was staged in a sense that King put in place
every element that made that photo possible.
He orchestrated it in this broader sense.
The whole Birmingham movement, in fact,
is a choreographed act.
It doesn't happen by accident; it happens because King
sat down with his people, and mapped out every single stage
of what they called Project C, Project Confrontation.
One of the things he notes, for example,
is in the early 60s, the networks had just extended
their nightly news from 15 minutes to 30 minutes.
That meant that for the first time
the network news had a news hole large enough
to cover an ongoing story.
What he realizes is, Oh, my goodness!
I can provide them with programming.
I can step forth and pull that, and fill that hole.
That's an opportunity for someone who wants to tell a story.
And, so, he says, I'm gonna put on a show
for that 15 minutes.
I don't know how many of you have ever been to Birmingham,
but the other crucial thing about understanding
the choreography of the Birmingham Campaign
is that everything, the whole area in which this entire
narrative unfolds is tiny.
There's 16th Street Baptist Church.
There's Kelly Ingram Park, which is a little square,
not really a park, it's two blocks.
And then there's white Birmingham on the other side.
So, King has this whole thing taking place
in the most accessible stage imaginable.
The kids come out of the front door of the church.
They walk not very far, the length of this stage,
and the paddy wagons are waiting and take them away.
So, you line up all of the press photographers,
and the cameramen, and the reporters,
and they don't have to move.
It all happens right in front of them, the whole story.
No chasing things, no running from here to there.
You see it happen in real time.
And you make sure that the photographer
from Life Magazine is there, Charles Moore.
And Charles Moore is the guy
who takes those famous photographs
of the kids getting their clothes torn off
by the high-pressure water hoses.
Why is Life so important?
Because in the early 1960s, 50% of American adults
read Life every week.
Gotta have Life.
Have to have the AP and the UPI photographers there, why?
Because in the early 60s, AP and UPI sent photographs
to, not hundreds, but thousands of newspapers
around the United States.
That was your conduit to the American public.
And he make sure that the news services are all there.
NBC, CBS, and ABC, why?
Because in the early 60s, the nightly news would attract
some extraordinary percentage of the American public.
That was your conduit to the mind
of the American population.
And he orchestrates this entire confrontation
with Bull Connor so that it builds slowly and slowly
over the course of many weeks,
and then comes to this dramatic
and absolutely riveting climax
on the weekend of May 3rd.
When the jails get full, then everything starts to explode
all at once.
And you realize is, even more crucially,
that the out-town media does not understand
the distinction between black protesters
and black bystanders.
They're not savvy enough about Birmingham
to know that there are two distinct groups of people here,
the people watching and the people doing.
And, so, what he starts to do, as the weekend wears on,
is he starts to delay the release of protesters
from the church until after work,
so all of the people who comes,
the African Americans who come out of work
working in downtown Birmingham
gather around 16th Street Baptist Church and Ingram Park.
Thousands of them and all of the news reporters
think that's part of the protest.
So, he's just got a couple of hundred kids,
but in all of the news accounts of the protest
that night and the next day,
they talk about there being thousands,
and thousands, and thousands, and thousands of protesters.
He's taken a mole hill and he's blown in up into a mountain.
I know it's fashionable today to talk about
how the democratization and the decentralization of media
has created opportunities for the weak and the powerless.
But, you know, when I read through the accounts
of Birmingham, I think that that is totally wrong.
That it was the centralization of the media back then
that created an opportunity for the powerless
and the weak to get their message out.
What would have happened today in Birmingham?
Well, there wouldn't have been one photo;
there would've been a hundred.
Fox News would have taken its own photos
which purported to show that Bull Connor
was actually was a nice guy,
and that nothing was happening.
The Huffington Post would have its own set of photos,
with their own set of analysis,
and then each blogger in the blogosphere
would work over their own separate visions
and video tape of this, and that, and the other.
The New Republic would do a counterintuitive take
on the photographs two weeks later.
You can't tell a single coherent story today.
There's too much access and decentralization
to the way we consume news.
But back then, when you have 50% of Americans
reading Life Magazine every week,
and where AP is supplying photographs
to absolutely every newspaper in the country,
and where you've got everyone watching the evening news.
Back then one photograph, that photograph,
can have an absolutely electric effect
on the way people choose to frame an incredibly important
and powerful image.
There's a moment in James Farmer's autobiography,
James Farmer was one of the leading civil rights activists
of that era.
And he's in 16th Street Baptist Church
with several of King's aides,
Wyatt Walker and Shuttlesworth,
when Bull Connor first sicks the dogs on the kids.
And Farmer describes turning to the two of them,
and seeing their reaction.
And they're not appalled, and they're not outraged,
and they're not shocked;
they're jumping up and down with glee.
They're jumping up and down saying,
We've got a movement, we've got a movement,
We've got a movement!
They realize it happened!
The thing that they had been working towards
for weeks, and weeks, and weeks had finally occurred!
They'd gotten that!
King's great deputy in Birmingham,
this guy Wyatt Walker said,
There was never anymore skillful manipulation
of the news media than there was in Birmingham.
And he's absolutely right.
They set it up so that we would get this one single
Now, was that an uncomfortable fact?
I don't think so.
It can sound a little weird to talk about
the extent to which there was manipulation in Birmingham;
but I think that's the brilliance of Birmingham.
The point that King was making in his confrontation
with Bull Connor was that the Jim Crow South
was this evil, and corrupt, and...
And racist place.
And that was a necessary, and profound,
and deeply true point.
But the story he told to make that point
was stage production.
It was an act of manipulation and imagination, why?
Because when you are powerless,
when you've got nothing else,
when you've got no money and no people behind you,
and when everything has, when you've just come
from a massive defeat in Albany,
manipulation and imagination are the only tools you've got.
So, take one last look at the photo.
It's supposed to be this photo
of a passive protester, a martyr,
being attacked by one of Bull Connor's dogs,
but is it really?
First of all, we know who the boy is.
The boy's a guy named Walter Gadsden.
He's 15 years old.
He was not a protester; he was a bystander.
He just came down to see what was happening.
He wasn't even in favor of what King
was doing in Birmingham.
He comes from a prominent, southern, wealthy
black family that owned a lot of newspapers,
and they were on the conservative side
of the black community.
And they were deeply skeptical of what King was doing
in this confrontation will Bull Connor.
Secondly, is he passive?
No, he's not passive; he's the furthest thing from passive.
First of all, passivity was how people read that photo.
They said, The saintly calm on his face
was why the AP news editor chose this particular photo.
But he doesn't have a saintly calm in his face.
Look at his arm.
His arm is grabbing the police officer.
No one trained in non-violent resistance,
no one who was truly gripped by saintly calm
would fasten their hand on the police officer in that way.
You're not supposed to touch the police officer.
And is he leaning forward passively into the dog
to let himself be bit?
No, look at his knee!
He's got his knee up in the dog's chest,
as he told people later, he grew up around dogs.
He grew up around, and vicious dogs.
He knew that if you confronted a dog like this,
that the way that you beat the dog back
was you lean into the dog,
and you kicked him in the chest and the throat.
He's kicking the dog.
Now look at the officer.
His face is clenched, and he's wearing those dark glasses,
which makes him look like evil incarnate.
But look at his leash.
The leash is taut.
He's not permitting the dog
to lunge and bite Walter Gadsden;
he's trying to pull the dog back.
He's trying to prevent him from biting Walter Gadsden.
This photo is not what it seems.
It's something entirely different.
It's the opposite, in fact, of what it seems.
It's not reality; it's theater.
And it's amazing theater.
And when the world is turned against you,
when your opponents are racist,
and when the public has abandoned you,
and when your prospects couldn't seem more dim,
a little bit of theater like this goes a long way.
I think we now have time for questions.
Oh, yes, we're gonna put out the...
[Man] Hi, NYPD policies like stop-and-frisk
have been shown to have a racial disparity,
and the criminal justice system at large
has been dubbed the new Jim Crow by some people.
Do you think the analogy holds up,
and do you think that there is a story or theater
to be told that could reform the criminal justice system?
Is there some analogy between stop-and-frisk and this?
A little, I wouldn't push it too far.
Remember, I don't, there is no comparison
between the kind of animating ideology of the NYPD
and Bull Connor.
I think that goes without saying.
But is the effect of criminal justice procedures
in America today similar
in that it's racially disproportionate?
Absolutely, the evidence of that is overwhelming.
Is it possible to do this kind of theater on that level?
Well, that was sort of my point,
that this is what I find fascinating
and a little bit disquieting about the way that,
the way that changes in the way that we consume media today.
And that is you can't have a single image like this anymore.
The days of iconic images seem, to my mind,
maybe I'm wrong, but they seem to my mind to have passed.
It's much harder to construct these kinds
of very, very simple powerful narratives.
It doesn't mean that it's impossible;
it means that it takes an awful lot more imagination,
perhaps, than it did in the past,
or at least many more resources.
I mean, 'cause what King is doing here
is he is hijacking this, he's got this monolithic,
not-terribly-sophisticated news system in place,
and he can just hijack it.
He can feed this powerful image into it,
and it's just consumed almost without reflection,
in a way that transports his own movement.
I don't know whether there's an analogy for that today.
And, so, I think these things like stop-and-frisk,
I mean, that's been, the range of racially-disproportionate
activities in the criminal justice system
had been going on largely unabated
for years, and years, and years,
and we haven't had this kind of moment with it,
which leads me to be a little bit pessimistic.
[Woman] Hi, you were talking about the decentralization
of the media, and the way that we consume the news today.
In your opinion, what do you think it would take today
to create that kind of awareness and...
Can we put the genie back in the bottle?
And the answer is I don't think we can.
I don't think we can ever return to that particular moment.
I mean, the notion, as someone who works for a magazine,
the factoid that 50% of adult Americans
read Life Magazine every week,
it just makes my heart break.
(chuckles) (audience laughing)
Boy, did I come along in the wrong era.
We will never ever be at that, I don't think,
be in that moment, again.
I think once you've crossed over into a decentralized
system of media, you don't go back.
Is there some other way?
I mean, we do see things go viral on the internet.
But the thing about things that go viral on the internet
is I wonder whether they have the half-life this does.
So, the thing about this picture is that it lingers.
It continues to have power even today.
It's iconic for everyone in this room.
The thing about the Civil Rights Movement
that's actually fascinating is I could put together
a slideshow of five pictures,
and I guarantee you that every single person in this room
has seen those pictures, and they have registered with them,
and we have an emotional,
we have the same emotional reaction.
The guy, remember, the picture taken after,
well, let's start with this one,
then the kids being hit,
Charles Moore's photo of the high-pressure hoses.
The man crying on the, no,
the man crying over Robert Kennedy's body.
Seen it, the black guy with the tear running down his cheek?
The people on the balcony when Martin Luther King is shot
in, was it Memphis, pointing at the shooter.
These are all, we all know those photos.
Is there a contemporary equivalent to that
of things that resonate with all of us like that?
I don't know either whether the most viral video
has that same, so we've, what's interesting to think about
is that we have, with modern media we have traded
something for something else.
It's not that modern media is better or worse;
We've traded access, and we've gotten access,
and we've traded away power, authority.
This picture has authority because of,
that thing has that same level of authority.
Like I said, I'm at a loss as to how we get back to that.
[Woman] Thank you.
Let's go over there.
[Woman] Can you discuss Abu Ghraib photos
in this context, both the distribution
and, again, the use of dogs?
Yeah, so, Abu Ghraib would be as close as we've come
to something of this magnitude.
But even Abu Ghraib, it's funny 'cause I've gotten,
it sounds like an odd thing to say,
but I've gotten very interested in torture recently,
been reading all the stuff on torture.
The number of people who still think that torture works,
or is acceptable under certain circumstances
is still incredibly large.
There's a huge portion
of the national security establishment
which still thinks of it as an effective tool in,
now, not the kind of petty...
Thing that was being shown at Abu Ghraib,
but at a kind of grander scale.
But there was still, that photo, that Abu Ghraib photo
as powerful and astonishing, and as grotesque as it was,
does not have the effect of creating a powerful,
national revolution against the subjugation
and torture of other people.
This is my point.
These pictures can have currency in the popular media;
but they don't have authority.
This picture has authority.
This picture, there's a bright line between this picture
and the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Show me a bright line between Abu Ghraib and something,
and I will, so, that's the kind of difference
in the context.
[Man] I'm wondering whether your book
about David and Goliath.
You're gonna deal, also, with the area
where David and Goliath took place,
mainly the picture of Muhammad al-Durrah
the little kid who got shot.
And it's really had a historic effect.
And then afterwards it appeared that maybe
that picture was also staged.
My book is not, yet, complete unfortunately.
If my publisher is here in the audience,
I would just like to give my profound regrets
for that fact.
I'm just now getting into, I,
in the course of writing this speech, got very interested.
Just to be clear what the horse is and what the cart is,
this is the horse, not the cart.
I wrote this speech and think,
Huh, maybe I should stick this in my book.
So, I'm just now getting into this,
and there's a whole really interesting literature
There's a wonderful book written by Errol Morris
recently on this very topic of the ways
in which photos are interpreted,
and the power that they have,
and the possibility that they can be
objects of manipulation.
So, that sounds like a wonderful thing to explore.
[Man] You mentioned something about
trying to put the genie back in the bottle
in terms of the way that media is.
It was centralized back at this time,
and now today that's it's not.
And I wonder, though, if it's something
we would even want to do because it occurs to me
that this sort of thing only happens when the media
is, A, interested in the subject,
and, B, is able to get there.
And I say this because in the last few months
hearing a lot about the reporting in Syria, for example.
One of the things that came up for a while
was that Bashar al-Assad's father, I guess,
perpetrated a horrendous massacre.
I think it was in the city of Homs in the early 80s,
or something like tens of thousands of people,
no one quite knows how many people were killed,
or what exactly happened because no one was able to get in.
And the reports that were coming out were so scant,
and so few that we don't really know what happened;
we know something horrendous happened.
But because the media couldn't get in,
or wasn't interested in whatever it was,
we have nothing like this where surely something like this,
and worse, could have been taken
had they'd been able to get there.
And, now, in the time of his son,
when everyone has a cellphone or a smart phone,
is able to upload videos of what's going on,
this protracted standoff may have ended over a weekend
had it taken place 30 years prior.
Yeah, I know, it's interesting.
It's part of the tradeoff.
So, we have this ledger of there are certain things
that current configuration of attitudes and technology
They give us, like I say, they give us extraordinary access.
You're right, geographical access to places
that we would not otherwise been able to access
to news we would never hear.
So, we've dramatically expanded the range of things
we can learn; but when you expand the range of things
you can learn, you diminish the individual power
of each thing.
And, like I say, it's not better or worse.
There are times and places where I much prefer
the current configuration,
but there are other times when I can see the value
of a world where a single image can,
where, it's more than that.
I can see the value of a world where
a bunch of guys with no money
in a little church in Birmingham
can jury-rig the entire media establishment
into, you know.
There's something so beautiful about that.
So, I see the value of that in times and places, as well.
There's no, I guess, there's no perfect configuration
of these things.
[Woman] So, early in the 90s, this young rebel
went into a tunnel track and drove into the Yellow House
in Caracas, Venezuela,
and later on he took power.
And this Sunday, he's going again for reelection,
Hugo Chavez Frias.
He's been 13 years in power.
And slowly there's a lot of repression in the news media.
It's very hard to get the real news out of the news.
And first time ever last Sunday,
actually two people got shot and killed
in one of the, what we call, Pacific organizations,
This was the first march.
We always have costume marches.
And, luckily, the president never gets in trouble,
never actually kills anybody.
And these weren't protesters;
they were just crossing by street and needed to get home.
And by crossing the street, people got out of their cars
and just walked over and they got shot, shot dead.
A girl, 15 year old, she survived,
and she was like, the media reported.
So, this Sunday we're going into elections,
and it's the first time the opposition
believes we have a shot at getting this person out of power.
But I still believe that the media in those areas
where there's a lot of repression
still have a very vivid image.
What do you think, compared to the US?
It's interesting, this goes to this thing about how...
The powerful of an individual image or story
is indirectly proportional to the number
of stories out there.
So, the fewer the stories there are,
the more weight and authority's attached
to each story that you have.
So, you're constantly playing off these two things.
Do I wanna flood the world with news,
and diminish the individual impact of each piece of news?
Or do I want to zero-in on just a few specific?
We have moved along that continuum over the last 30 years,
and we're exploring the kind of dimensions of that.
What I would love to see, and what's fascinating,
the point you're making is I think kind of fascinating,
which is that there are places in the world
that are still very much in this older paradigm.
And it's fascinating to kind of compare
their kind of media journeys with ours.
It's funny, a version of this is that writers
have encountered all the time is,
20 years ago, if you were a writer
and you got a bad review in the New York Times,
your life was over, essentially.
You would go off by yourself for many years,
and hide under blankets,
and then you would maybe emerge.
Everyone read it, people would bring it up
to you at parties.
Your mother would call you and say,
What did the New York Times say about your book?
Now no individual review anywhere has any impact
because there's so many.
There's a zillion, people say crazy things
about you on the internet.
It doesn't matter because there's so much being said.
Who can find it, who cares? (audience laughing)
It's this weird thing.
The paradox is the more that is said about you,
the less you have to wonder about any individual thing
That's a kind of frivolous corollary
to what we're talking about here.
I feel like there is insufficient recognition
of this tension.
And there is an unfortunate tendency
to always think that flooding is an appropriate,
[Man] When you talk about theater and modern media,
the first thing that comes to mind, for me,
in recent memory is the Occupy Movement.
It's obviously a much larger-scaled theater
that was paved across the country and across the world.
But it was also interesting to me to hear from people
who were there about how the coverage
of the protests in Zuccotti Park were,
I don't wanna say ignored, but sort of slandered
until some of the actual members of the media
were in collateral with that,
and just how coverage of that fluctuated
over the course of its popularity.
Yeah, well, Occupy is a really,
really, really interesting...
Example of what I'm talking about.
So, Occupy comes along in this dispersed world,
where it's no longer possible to kind of hijack
the media apparatus.
And, so, the question is what can you accomplish
in that kind of fragmented environment?
And I actually think that in many ways Occupy represents
a brilliant answer to that,
which was that many of the things that were perceived
to be weaknesses, its lack of leadership,
its lack of a clearly-articulated purpose,
its lack of, compared to someone like King,
couldn't be more different.
King has got an ideology, a strategy, a hierarchy,
and a plan of action where if this person
is taking three steps in this direction,
I'm gonna plan it out in advance.
Occupy's really on the opposite end
of all of those spectrum.
But what they do do, and I think with this election,
actually, to my mind has shown how incredibly effective
they were on a macro scale.
What Occupy does is it injects the issue
of income inequality permanently into,
not permanently, but in a very real and dramatic way
into the political rhetoric of not just this country,
but around the West.
I do not believe that Mitt Romney's 47% comment,
for example, would have resonated the way it had
had it not been, had we not been primed by Occupy.
By that kind of, a group of people who stubbornly
camp out in these places around the country,
and just say, I want you to think about income inequality.
I don't have a solution to it.
I'm not going any further than that.
I just want you to think about it.
In a certain way, that's the way you do it.
They planted that issue in the political conversation,
and they would not let people change subject
because what happens, of course, is that
when people are dealing with an inconvenient truth,
they change subject.
Occupy wouldn't let us.
And that is a, I counted myself at the time
as an Occupy skeptic, and I am no longer.
I now see, look, we're still talking about this,
and we should be and it's because a group of people
refused to give in.
It is a highly, in many ways, it is as innovative a response
to their media environment as this one is
to the media environment of the 1960s.
[Woman] Thank you for your always-engaging work.
I promise I'm not shilling for your publisher,
and I know that the book has not been written,
but I'm wondering if you could preview for us
some of the tragedies that you're finding
are most salient in successfully taking down
the Goliaths, and the compliments and factors
that needs to come together for that.
Or if you prefer to take it the other way,
what are some of the tragedies that seem like
they should be successful that are commonly undertaken
that don't work?
Some of the things that all the guys before David
tried to do and--
Well, of course, if I tell you too much.
[Woman] Not too much.
My commercial interests are contradicting my,
well, let's see.
Those are the two directions of the book, yes.
No, I'm really, I'll give you one example.
So, I'm very, very interested in the relationship
between resources and outcomes.
So, the thing that Goliath says that makes him Goliath
is he has more resources than everyone else.
More money, more tools, more weapons, more whatever.
One of the questions I'm trying to answer in the book
is at what point does the relationship
between resources and outcomes break down?
Is there such a thing as having too many resources?
And it clearly is.
I sort of go through and I document
instances where many Goliaths had this impression
that, If I have a little bit of resources, I'm doing well;
and if I add more resources, I'll just continue to do well
on, and on, and on, and on, and on like this.
Until if I'm the richest country in the world,
I can't be beat.
Well, guess what, the richest country in the world
gets beat all the time, why is that?
Well, maybe with that the relationship
between resources and outcomes doesn't look like that.
Maybe it looks like that.
So, there's a bunch of examples,
but the most fun was I started, I (laughs)
I decided that I would interview children
of very, very rich people, and ask them,
Daddy's a billionaire; what's it like?
Without exception, children of billionaires,
if you dig, they don't like being the children
of a billionaire.
It kinda sucks.
To the extent that they formulated,
they believe their parents have too much money.
And it's clearly obvious if you listen to their lives.
You don't wanna be the child of a billionaire.
You don't wanna be a child of someone
who is poverty-stricken.
And it's nicer to be the child of someone who makes $75,000
than someone who makes $35,000.
But do you want your parents to have a billion?
No, you don't.
And I listen to these people.
There was one girl, poor girl, (audience laughing)
her grandfather had all this money.
I've never heard a more miserable account of her life.
First of all, no one in her life works.
So, think about it.
Grandfather's a billionaire, so her mother, her father,
her aunt, her uncle, her other aunt and her uncle,
none of them work.
She has no one in her life who works.
It's this abstract concept out there.
And nothing's pleasurable because if you've got,
there's nothing she can be attained if she wants to,
and then she has to,
I'm not gonna give the name of the school
because maybe someone went there.
What I didn't realize until I talked to all these rich kids
is that there's a whole class of rich-kid schools out there,
which is schools for people
who are children of billionaires;
and they're not the schools that we in this room go to.
There are these weird places like in Florida.
She was talking about her school,
and she's like, If you walk through the parking lot
in my school it's like,
She goes, I'm quoting her,
Bimmer, Bimmer, Rolls-Royce, Bimmer,
It's like who wants to go to that school?
I don't wanna go that school
She was describing her, she said the most common word
said at her school was, I'm paying $60,000 tuition.
There's no way dot, dot, dot.
It's all this sort of, do you wanna live in a culture
of excess and entitlement your entire life?
No, you don't.
She was the one who wanted, she was rebellious.
She wanted to start her own business,
but she couldn't do anything on her own.
She wanted to have a job.
Where did she get a job?
With one of the family non-profits.
And then she wanted to be independent,
so she moved out of her house,
but her grandfather was still paying her rent,
and her health insurance.
If she needed money, she would go down,
I was like, What car do you drive?
She goes, Well, my grandfather just got me a car.
I said, What is it?
Well, it's a Lincoln.
To her mind she was making a modest choice here.
What I've described is hell.
You don't want that.
You don't want a life where you can't even
do anything for yourself without the long shadow of your,
so it's, and this came up again, and again, and again.
And then I started to interview the billionaires themselves
and, Was there a point where you felt that your money
was no longer helping your family,
but impairing your family?
And it's incredibly emotional thing,
where these people who have built these enormous businesses
from scratch and achieved great things.
They say, Actually, I think I have made
my children's life worse.
That second billion was a bad idea.
Now, I realize that, I don't wanna come across
as someone who is crying the blues for the 1%.
I'm not saying they lives of quiet desperation.
But I will say this, that when they tell you
that their lives would be impaired
if we taxed them appropriately, they're lying.
(laughs) (audience laughing)
In fact, if we taxed them appropriately,
they would be better parents.
So, I think actually this is the line
the Democratic Party needs to use henceforth.
We'll just say, Look, I mean, I know this is
an impingement on your liberty,
but I'm really concerned about your kids.
Anyway, so, that's a fun part of the book.
[Woman] It's great to hear your things.
[Man] Hello, this is gonna sound like a non-sequitur,
but I'm gonna bring you back to this picture.
And this is a very speculative question.
So, you talked about how this picture was so pivotal,
so important and critical, and how desperate King was.
And how he was running out of time,
running out of options.
If one parent stood up and said,
My kid's safety is more important.
The whole thing could have fallen apart.
This was his union, like you said,
this was his last chance.
What if this picture hadn't been taken?
Where would the Civil Rights Movement go?
Well, there might have been another photo,
we don't know.
This was the one that they got lucky with.
The Charles Moore photos were also pretty powerful,
although nothing seemed to have had the particular power
I guess the way to answer your question
is if no one had taken a perfect picture in Birmingham,
what would have happened in Birmingham?
And I guess I would say I'm skeptical
of whether Birmingham would have had the same effect.
Look, it wasn't like racism and Jim Crow
was this new thing that Americans didn't know about.
It had been going on for a long time,
and people had done exactly nothing.
Brown versus Board of Education, it passed in '54,
and not a single black child is in an integrated school
in Alabama, South Carolina, Mississippi.
There was no great sense of urgency in America
about civil rights among, in the North,
among the northern white community.
These guys had to be woken up.
Would they had been sat there complacently
for another 10 years?
Maybe, who knows?
I am not someone who believes in the inevitability
of historical movements.
Repression, and discrimination, and racism
are things that quite happily exist
for a long period of time unless something happens,
something special and powerful happens.
Absent this photo, could Birmingham have blown over?
Yeah, I think so.
I mean, hopefully there'd been something else,
but, remember, King's shot a couple of years later.
So, that particular window closes awfully quickly
with at least him in the leadership role.
[Man] Hey, I wanted to follow up with the discussion
of that picture, and ask your thoughts about
how long the effect lasts.
And the example I would give is in thinking that
these things never end is this summer,
I live in New Orleans and drove to Charleston
for a vacation.
And that quest sent us through the state highway in Georgia.
And eight, nine hours into the drive route
on this state highway, and the cross street we passed
is Bull Connor Boulevard.
And my wife is kind of dazed, and I turned to her,
and I said, Sarah, did you see that?
And she said, No.
It's just interesting to me that notwithstanding all this,
notwithstanding the drama,
notwithstanding the Civil Rights Act,
notwithstanding sort of good intentions all along,
that maybe you're never there really,
maybe you're never there.
I did not know that anyone would still have the gumption
to call it Bull Connor, I mean,
he was truly a despicable man.
Lots of upstanding racist people in Birmingham
didn't like him.
It wasn't just that he was, (audience laughing)
so, yeah, I guess my conclusion to that would be
the same one that I have when I walk
around American college campuses
and see all of the buildings donated by people,
that the bar is awfully low for getting your name
in public in this country.
As a tradition at these talks that I take,
as a Canadian, that I take a shot at American colleges
(audience laughing) every chance I get.
[Man] One last question about the photo.
I just was interested to know was it debunked
in that time, like you did today in your speech,
did the truth about this photo come out
in writing and in words?
And any time after in the 60s,
did people know about it, or is it just lost over
because of, as you said earlier,
the power of just a simple image back then versus today?
In the black media world, it was,
Walter Gadsden was interviewed by a Jet magazine.
They find him and they're like,
What we're you doing?
Said, I was walking in the street.
I don't even like King.
So, he came out. (audience laughing)
It was a good deal more because in the black press,
of course, they could tell the difference
between protesters and bystanders,
at least do a lot better job of it
than the white media.
And, remember, King was dealt with a good deal
more skepticism in some corners
of the black press in that time.
So, yeah, his story came out.
In fact, although to this day you will see
him described as a protester.
And to this day there's very little recognition
of the ambiguities of the photo.
So, yeah, it's one of those,
it was an open secret for,
Walter Gadsden in Diane McWhorter's book,
if I'm remembering correctly,
she tracks down Walter Gadsden many years later,
and she wants him to discuss this incident.
And he still wants nothing to do with it.
He's like, Won't return her phone calls.
It's this strange thing about people captured
in that moment.
They can be ambivalent about the fuss made about there.
Sure, I don't know how much time I have.
Who's in charge? (audience laughing)
I'll keep going until someone tells me to stop.
[Man] You may have given the extent
of your answer to this.
Do you know how he got into this position
in the first place?
Yeah, so, he's, it's complicated.
There's a number of different stories,
but it seems like he was arrested before this photo,
or at least he encounters the cop because he's loitering.
'Cause they want people as bystanders.
And then he keeps walking, and then the cop
grabs him and spins him around.
He sees the dog, the dog is a surprise.
He doesn't realize the dog is there.
He sees the dog, and the cop is surprised, as well.
And, so, the cop yanks back the dog,
and he, just his reflexes to lean in
and just give this dog a big kick.
The key thing that I didn't talk about
is look at the other bystanders, the people watching it;
and what you don't see is alarm on their faces.
So, this is, believe me, there was no shortage
of horrendous things happening on the streets of Birmingham
on May 3rd, 1963.
This isn't one of them.
They're just, it's this guy walking down.
The other people are like, What's going on?
No one's jumping up and down here.
Quite different is the Charles Moore photos
of the kids being hit by the water.
Those things are like, you can see shock and horror
This is kind of, which is why it gives me such delight.
The kind of fabulous opportunism.
It's making something out of nothing.
And the idea that you would bring the power structure
of the, you know what it brings to mind
is the whole notion in, not just African American culture,
but in many old slave cultures.
I think Jamaica has a version of this, as well,
of the trickster hero.
In Jamaica they call 'em, I think,
are there any Jamaicans here?
Jamaica do we call the trickster hero a gentle?
I think we call 'em a gentle.
Anyway, there's all these versions in old slave cultures
of the guy who looks powerless,
but who plays a trick on the person in power.
This is gentle territory.
It's a fabulous act, a little trick played
on the white power structure.
There's something so fabulous about it.
I really do.
[Woman] Hi, oop.
[Woman] Excuse me, this should be our last question.
[Woman] Okay, I thoroughly enjoyed it.
This is my first New Yorker Fest,
so it's very exciting.
But to kind of go on that,
when I first saw this I was like, Oh!
And then you broke it down, and I'm kinda disappointed.
(audience laughing) Like I feel tricked.
That's how I feel when I read the news today.
I don't feel tricked, but I would never have noticed
the things, or seen it in the way that you described,
and now I'm kinda sad.
Oh, (chuckles) well that's what I said...
a little bit in my--
[Woman] Do you feel like that's what's bad
about the media today?
No, I feel like it is appropriate
for you to feel uncomfortable about,
that's our first reaction to acts of manipulation.
But I think we have to understand that manipulation
is a tool of the powerless.
And if you want a world where the powerless can fight back,
you have to put your discomfiture
of being deceived aside.
Rules are written for and by the powerful, remember that.
All of our codes of conduct are invariably things
that people in authority put across
in order to maintain their authority.
Rule breakers are people who are,
tricksters are people who are trying
to make due with nothing, with not a lot.
I didn't really make this point well enough, I think.
I think that after overcoming our sense of discomfiture
and disappointment, we have to applaud the trickster hero.
And say, You know what,
that's how you get back against power.
And trickery is this, and deception
are the greatest tools of the,
some of the greatest tools of downtrodden.
Well, thank you all very much.
(audience applauding) Bye, bye.