>> Marie Arana: Hello,
and a very big welcome
to National Book
Festival Presents.
My name is Marie Arana and
I'm the Literary Director
of The Library of Congress.
National Book Festival
Presents is a year round series,
an extension of the very popular
Annual National Book Festival,
which launched at
the end of September.
This year for the first time
we bring you the Festival
in virtual format on a platform
that you can access by going
to loc.gov/bookfest and
connecting to a vast offering
of wonderful programs on books
of every genre for every age.
But here we are starting
up a new season
of National Book
Festival Presents
and it's my great
privilege to bring you
yet another fascinating segment.
This time we offer the
prizewinning bestselling
American Historian, Jon Meacham.
It's not often that a
Biographer laboring for years
on a life story that he or she
suspects might be important
for our times hits publication
day at the perfect moment,
the perfect storm, when all
of us can understand just
how right the times are
for this particular book
and this precise story.
That is exactly what
we have here
with Jon Meacham's Biography
of the Late John Lewis,
a towering figure in civil
rights, a man whose courage,
conviction and clear
sense of justice have come
to represent what it means, what
it should mean to be American,
to have a higher purpose,
to make democracy live
up to its promise.
Jon's book, His Truth Is
Marching On, John Lewis
and the Power of Hope,
tells us exactly the story.
So let me tell you a bit
about Jon, who is well known
to us here at The
Library of Congress.
He's done his research
in our halls
and over the years he's joined
us often to tell our audiences
about the American story.
A former Journalist and
leading Editor at Time
and Newsweek magazines, as
well as the Executive Editor
of Random House, Jon has
always managed to write books
that somehow connect history
to the immediate moment,
books that tell us something
about ourselves as Americans
and about the crucibles
we've faced.
Whether it be Thomas
Jefferson finding the words
to define a new country or the
friendship forged in wartime
between Franklin Roosevelt
and Winston Churchill
or the political
travails of Andrew Jackson
or the abiding ever contentious,
ever evolving spirit
of the American people Jon has
a knack for giving us a new lens
by which to see ourselves.
You can find Jon's illuminating
talk about American ingenuity
and John Lewis' undeniable part
in it among the National
Book Festival programs
that are available to you
right now at loc.gov/bookfest.
Please also stay tuned to
the very end of this program
when we'll talk briefly
with Adrienne Cannon,
the Library's lead curator
on America's transformative
civil rights years.
But now please welcome Carla
Hayden, the 14th Librarian
of Congress, in conversation
with the Pulitzer Prizewinning
Author, Jon Meacham,
about a civil rights hero
and a great American,
the indomitable John Lewis.
Dr. Hayden?
>> Carla Hayden: Thank you
so much, and we are honored
to be joined by Pulitzer
Prizewinning Author
and Historian, Mr. Jon Meacham.
And, Mr. Meacham, it's
a personal honor for me
because I have been a fan
for so long and your book
about John Lewis
couldn't be more timely.
And I wondered --
and he's also a hero,
and I wondered you're both what
they call Sons of the South
and how did you lure him to,
or you might not have had
to lure him, but how did
you get him to talk to you,
write about this, and
then at that crucial time
at the end of his life?
>> Jon Meacham: Sure.
Well, I think if you're going
to have heroes I would
have Jon Lewis first,
I would put me way
down on that list.
I met Congressman Lewis 28 years
ago in 1992 on an election night
in Atlanta, and I was
what I called myself,
the Atlanta Bureau Chief
of The Chattanooga Times.
I was, in fact, the
Atlanta Bureau,
so it was a self-appointment.
I ran it out of Room 216 of
the La Quinta Inn on I-85.
But there was a Senate
runoff in Georgia,
and one of the currencies of
power on an election night,
as you know, is not to be seen.
If you're a politician
you're supposed
to be off doing priestly things,
you're probably just
watching TV somewhere else.
But I walked in and there
was John Lewis and Lillian,
his wonderful wife, just
standing in the ballroom
in Atlanta with the
Georgia Democratic Party,
and I went up to him and quite
tremulously asked a couple
of questions.
Chiefly, did he miss the
clarity of the movement?
At that point the debates
in the country were
about affirmative action,
about quotas, we'd just come
through the Civil Rights Act
of 1991-92, and it was more
of a mess honestly than
access to the voting booth,
than taking down
the Jim Crow signs.
And he gave a John Lewis' like
answer, which was thoughtful,
deep, and ultimately hopeful,
which was that you have
to continue the march until
we bring about what he called
and Dr. King called the Beloved
Community, which is another way
of talking about the
Kingdom of God on Earth.
And it began a 30-year dispute
really, we argued about this,
because I don't believe
that you can bring
about the Kingdom
of God on Earth.
Now I have Reinhold Niebuhr
and Barack Obama on my side,
but John Lewis had Dr. King on
his side and he was John Lewis,
so he always won the argument.
We did share a regional
connection, he grew up in Troy,
Alabama, I grew up in
Chattanooga, Tennessee,
but we were from radically
different parts of that South.
He was 30 years older than I
was and obviously a black man,
I was a younger white guy
who had missed the highwater
mark of the movement.
And so I had an intellectual
interest in it,
a historical interest in it.
The fascinating thing
about John, as you know,
was that quiet persistent,
enveloping charisma,
and it was quiet.
He listened very carefully,
he would always lean in,
but then when he spoke it
was like Amos or Isiah,
there was this deep Moses,
it was this deep prophetic
voice speaking to the culture.
And I always knew I
wanted to write about him.
We stayed in touch those years.
We'd often talk on a
commemoration and anniversary,
after some kind of news event.
I would save the notes, very
Library of Congress like,
and would try to
continue this conversation
about the perfectibility
of reality.
And he never fully convinced me,
I surely never convinced him,
but the difference is
that he was willing to die
for his vision, he was willing
to shed blood and did shed blood
for this notion that we could
in fact if our dispositions
of heart and mind were in the
right place we could bring
about the way of love on earth.
And I just don't think there
was an equivalent figure
in the second half of the 20th
Century, certainly after 1968,
who combined the consistent
adherence to that vision,
the consistent stand
he took in the arena,
insisting that our better
angels could in fact triumph
over our worst instincts.
And when I was standing on
the bridge, the Pettus Bridge,
in March with my family and
about a thousand other people
and I realized listening
to him, this is last March,
that this was probably
his last trip.
The pancreatic cancer, which
also claimed Justice Ginsberg,
had brought him back
interestingly more or less
to the weight and shape
he was when he had been
on the bridge the first time.
And so there was this
compelling kind of vision of him
in this place with Jim
Lawson, who is now in his 90s,
with Ruby Bridges, you know,
with Speaker Pelosi, you know,
with these people who then
and now continue this push
toward making us a more
perfect Union.
And I realized that I
wanted to tell his story
through a theological lens,
largely because so many of us --
I'm a Christian, I'm
not a very good one --
as Robert Louis Stevenson
once said,
the duty of the Christian
is not to succeed,
but to fail cheerfully, and by
that standard I'm pretty good
at it because I fail
all the time.
But I wanted to find a way
to show how profession could
come closer to practice.
And I have never met anyone
in public or private life
who more clearly
and compellingly
embodied the profession
and the practice more than John.
>> Carla Hayden: And that
comes through in the book
and might surprise some people
the fact that the faith,
and you're a man of faith, and
the connection to sainthood
and the fact that saints are
perfect, but he, his faith,
what do you think, it started
so strong, the preaching
to the chickens when
he was a child?
>> Jon Meacham: Yes, there
were about three tributaries
that formed the river
of John Lewis.
One was an innate revulsion
against the segregated
order he encountered
in Pike County, Alabama
in the 1940s.
The only white person he saw
with any regularity
was the mailman,
and he had what's
pretty compelling,
again the compelling evidence is
he just revolted against that,
that it struck him as inherently
unfair and that was something
that it just came to
him, it was truly innate.
He was the great grandson of a
slave, his great grandfather,
Frank Carter, had been born
in slavery, he knew him.
His grandfather and father
were both sharecroppers,
they had a number
of different jobs,
but they farmed there
in Pike County.
So one tributary was the
revulsion against segregation.
Another tributary was
the church, itself,
Baptist Church, A.M.E. Church.
And he heard the gospel, he
heard the Sermon on the Mount,
he heard the prophets
of the Hebrew Bible
who promised a different
Kingdom.
The great passages if Isaiah
and Amos and others, Daniel,
are all about transformation,
it's about a regeneration
of creation, and justice
will come down like waters
and righteousness
like a mighty stream.
It's not a mistake that
it was a desert people
who framed their prophetic hopes
in terms of irrigation, right,
I mean it was very
practical in that sense.
And John had, again,
consistent sense
that he was less interested
in heaven as a place to go to
and was more interested in
heaven as a place to make
on earth and to try to
achieve a kind of perfection
within time and space.
The third tributary is, and it
goes to the work of the Library,
it goes to the work
of the press,
of books, was the media itself.
He saw the pictures of Emmett
Till after the lynching in 1955,
he and Emmett Till were
about the same age.
He read about the
Brown decision.
He sat waiting in
the summer of 1954
for all his new white friends
to come to school with him
because the Supreme Court
had made this decision so,
therefore, all the
white people were coming
and of course it never happened.
When he was at American Baptist
here in Nashville he was here,
his first fall here was the
fall of the Little Rock Nine,
and that remarkable stand for
the rule of law and the rule
of justice over in Arkansas.
So authoring Lucy, who had
attempted to integrate,
desegregate the University
of Alabama in 1956.
So he read about
all of these things
and centrally he heard Martin
Luther King on the radio
because 1955-56 was the
Montgomery Bus Boycott,
and it began in early
December 1955
when Rosa Parks made
her decision
and lasted through much of '56.
And he heard a sermon of King's
on the radio from Dexter,
which was Paul's Letter
to the American Christian,
so it was one of Dr. King's
somewhat labored metaphorical
sermons about what Paul
would write to the Christians
in America in the 20th Century
and that changed his life.
So you had these
three tributaries
that formed this rushing stream
that when he came to Nashville
in the Fall of 1957 he
was ready, he was ready
to do something about
segregation
because of a vision rooted
in faith and he understood
that the world itself was not
moving very quickly toward that,
but that there were
in fact signs
that the country was
beginning to reckon with this.
>> Carla Hayden: And he was
a young, the youngest person
on the march on Washington
in '63 --
>> Jon Meacham: Right.
>> Carla Hayden: -- and
had to be edited basically
down to the last minute
and people think of him
as the elder statesman, but
he was a young whippersnapper
and really wanted
to say some things.
>> Jon Meacham: Yes, he was
the Black Lives Matter guy
of August 1963.
And it's funny when you read
the first draft of the speech
that got the Archbishop
of Washington
and the Justice Department
and the White House all upset,
it's not that Shermanesque.
And I think actually
if we didn't know
about the first draft we would
think the second draft was
pretty tough as well.
And so the march is
a fascinating moment
and it's a great
inflection point
in the lives of the nation.
I had a chance, I interviewed
Harry Belafonte for this,
the coolest man on the planet.
>> Carla Hayden: Yes.
>> Jon Meacham: Without
a doubt, just no doubt,
incredibly remarkable figure,
who spent a lot of his own money
and was a hugely
important supporter
of Dr. King's and SNCC and SCLC.
Dr. King spent a lot
of time in New York
in the Belafonte apartment,
so Harry has got notes
that Dr. King would make for
speeches and would leave them,
you know, in the
guestroom and he had
to grab them and hold onto them.
But Belafonte told me that
of course Martin's speech,
as he put it, was so brilliant,
but to him the most
important speech
of the day was John Lewis'
because it was the
speech of the students.
John was 23 at the time
and had been involved
in the movement really
since he was 19,
when he started the sit-ins, 19
and 20 the sit-ins in Nashville.
And, you know, the
Administration,
the Kennedy Administration was
not excited to say the least
about having 250,000
black people show up
and possibly complicate the
Congressional deliberation
of the Civil Rights Act
that had been proposed
on June 11th of '63.
Parenthetically, three things
happened on June 11th, 1963.
One is George Wallace stood
in the schoolhouse door
in Tuscaloosa, that night
President Kennedy proposed the
Civil Rights Act, and two
hours later Medgar Evers was
assassinated in Jackson,
Mississippi, all in one day.
So this was a hectic period for
contemporary American history.
The Kennedy Administration
convinced the organizers not
to have the march go
toward the Capitol,
but to go to the Memorial, that
was a compromise to have it
in the shadow of Lincoln.
It was the right
one, but it wasn't,
that was not the first
choice of the organizers,
the organizers wanted
to be on the steps
of the Capitol demanding
action, so that happened.
The other, to me, fascinating
thing is the Kennedy
Administration had
stationed not one
but two people inside the
Lincoln Memorial ready
to cut the microphone
to John Lewis' speech
if Lewis went off script.
And one of them had an LP
of Mahalia Jackson singing
He's Got The Whole World
In His Hands ready to play that
blasting over the loudspeakers
to cover the fact that they
might have had to censor Lewis.
>> Carla Hayden: And to
think that he was 23,
he was the rebel, he was the one
that they were worried about,
and then years later one of his
last acts, public acts was to go
to Black Lives Matter
Plaza and stand there.
And do you think he had that
sense of a baton being passed,
that these are the young people
now that are doing what we tried
to do and were successful?
>> Jon Meacham: John Lewis
fundamentally understood the
power of story, he understood
the power of narrative.
And one of the reasons
he undertook the number
of commemorations he did, always
taking members of Congress back
to Selma, Montgomery and
Birmingham every year was not
for self-aggrandizement, but
was to keep the story alive,
to keep the lantern burning
because he understood
that if he could make the
connection between his own life
and the remarkable
changes that had occurred
and the remarkable changes
that still have to occur,
if he could show lawmakers
and show the country
that human beings
had the capacity
to make these remarkable
changes in the past
that we could do it now.
And so there was a poetic and
quite well thought out reason
for his taking pains in
the weeks before he died
for his going to Lafayette
Park and standing there.
And this is not to say that
it was in any way cynical,
but he understood that there
would be photographers,
he understood that it meant
something that the man
who had been on the Pettus
Bridge, the man who had been
on the Freedom Rides, the man
who had been arrested 40
times during the movement,
the man who had beaten in
Rock Hill and Montgomery
and Birmingham, who had
spent time at Parchment
in Mississippi, he
understood that it mattered.
That there was bridge, if you
will, between the highwater mark
of the Civil Rights movement
which is forever at in danger
of slipping into myth and
legend and the very hard work
that has to be done today.
And the movement is not
myth and it's not legend
because it wasn't
foreordained then,
it was a remarkable
and close run thing.
As Wellington said at Waterloo,
it was the damndest close run
thing you ever saw in your life,
and you think about the
factors, state sanctioned,
white supremacists, law
enforcement led violence
to prevent the full
implications, the Declaration
of Independence from
being applied to everyone.
That was true 60 years ago, it
is to some extent true today,
and if it's true to any
extent then we owe it
to the founding ideals
of the country to try
to make them real, and that's
what John fully understood
and again was willing
to die for.
>> Carla Hayden: You've
mentioned Justice Ginsberg
and then of course Congressman
Lewis and the passing
so close together, and
there's a part in your book
that emphasizes --
I have your book,
I keep petting it right here
-- most gripping about the fact
that Martin Luther King had
been assassinated in April
and Congressman Lewis
was very active
with the Robert Kennedy
campaign.
In fact, the scene that
is shown quite a bit
about Robert Kennedy going out
to the crowd in Indianapolis,
in your book you mention
that John Lewis was the one
who basically gave him the words
and told him you have to get
up there, that's not
always portrayed.
And then in June John
Lewis was upstairs
in the hotel suite
waiting with other people,
part of the campaign, for
Robert Kennedy to come up
and when they got the word he
fell to his knees in agony,
John Lewis, and said why, why?
So that type of despair,
some people feel that type
of thing now, and the
idea of hope and history
and looking back and giving
people hope, what do you think
in terms of Congressman Lewis
and how he was able
to survive that?
That was devastating.
>> Jon Meacham: It's
devastating.
You know, 1968 is
worth remembering.
We lost 46 Americans a
day on average in Vietnam,
not wounded but killed.
The year began with Ted,
Senator Kennedy gets in the race
on March 16th quite late,
March 31st is the day
that Lyndon Johnson
got out of the race.
It was a Sunday, that was the
day Dr. King preached what would
become his final Sunday sermon
at the Cathedral in Washington.
He is killed on Thursday night.
Senator Kennedy is on
his way to Indianapolis.
John Lewis is basically one of
the advance guys and he says,
well, Kennedy called from
the plane and said, you know,
the police chief wanted
them to not come in.
Interestingly, Indianapolis
is one of the few cities
that escaped large
scale violence,
not least because of what
Robert Kennedy said that night.
And then, of course, the riots
and the despair, inaction,
that unfolded that weekend.
To John Lewis, though,
despair was a sin
because the whole forward
motion of his life was
that hope was possible,
that progress was possible,
and you don't have to
listen to a boring white guy
from the South to believe
that, just listen to him.
He said again and again
when he was in Congress,
if you don't think America can
change come walk in my shoes.
So here's a man who is born
great grandson of a slave,
in segregated Alabama, who
dies eulogized by Presidents
and mourned by millions.
And I don't use that
dichotomy as a sign
of the temporal honors,
it's not just about that,
it's about what he did for
the country that led to that,
those eulogies and
that mourning.
And what he did again and
again and again is he walked
into the teeth of
seemingly hopeless causes
and made them hopeful,
and he did it
by a fundamental moral appeal
that we were a better country
than we were acting like.
And that consistent
message, a message backed
up by his own physical bravery,
remarkable physical bravery.
I think sometimes, you know,
rightly we celebrate Gettysburg
and Normandy and Placu, Selma,
Alabama is a battlefield.
John Lewis is a war
hero, he bore the wounds
of physical bravery and
he did it just as surely
as if he had taken
up traditional arms
and served overseas.
And I think that
for us in a moment
that is not unlike 1968 honestly
because of the declining faith
in public institutions, because
of the ferocity of the time,
after as you say Senator
Kennedy is killed the first week
of June, Chicago Democratic
Convention remember descends
into chaos and violence,
and on Election Day 1968 55%
of America voted for
either Richard Nixon
or George Wallace for President.
George Wallace carried 13.5% of
the popular vote and five states
in the Electoral College.
So we sometimes see this as Vice
President Humphrey almost beat
Nixon, that's true, but
13.5% of Americans thought
that George Wallace should
be President 52 years ago.
So are we really that
far from that moment?
Not really, without
being partisan, you know,
the 45th President is in many
ways people want to see him
as a unique figure, that lets
us off the hook a little bit
because what he really is
is the fullest manifestation
of perennial American forces
that we need to do all we can
to keep in abeyance as
opposed to having them flow
through the body politic.
And so I think that
the Lewis' message,
which is love your neighbor
and love your enemy,
two incredibly different things.
I like most of my neighbors, I
don't want to love my enemies,
they're my enemies
for Christ's sake,
why would I want
to love my enemies?
That's just crazy, but
it's what Moses taught us,
it's what Jesus taught us,
and it's what John
Lewis did in our time.
He hasn't been dead, he's
been dead barely two months,
and I do as you say
I make the case
for his essential
Christian sainthood,
the blood of the
martyrs is the seat
of the church is
the old insight.
And they don't have to
be perfect to be saints
and I don't want to put him in
stained glass and I don't want
to put him on a pedestal
except I want him to be
on a tall enough pedestal
that all of us can see him
because if you see him then
you have a better chance
of emulating him.
>> Carla Hayden: And you
mentioned a gentleman,
Jim Lawson, who we're seeing for
many people for the first time
at Congressman Lewis' funeral.
And he's in his 90s,
but he was the person
that really played
a vital role too,
and I have to just
quote what he said.
It was not enough he would
say simply to adore a beating,
it was not enough to resist
the urge to strike back
at an assailant, that urge can't
be there, you have to do more
than just not hit back, you have
to have no desire to hit back,
you have to love that
person who is hitting you.
When I read that I thought
that's a tall order,
as you said, but he did it,
but John Lewis did it,
he believed in that.
>> Jon Meacham: James Lawson may
be the most important American
that not enough people know.
There's probably a bigger
category than you or I would
like to admit, but
he's right up there.
He was the son of a
Methodist minister,
he himself is a Methodist
minister,
he was a conscientious
objector during the Korean War,
he went to jail for his refusal
to participate in the draft.
He went to India and met --
it was too late to meet
Gandhi himself, but spent time
with Gandhi's lieutenants,
began to understand.
Howard Thurman had kind
of pioneered that journey
for the black experience
to intersect
with the Indian nonviolent
movement.
And Lawson came back
as a kind of embodiment
of the black church, the
Methodist social consciousness,
and the means that
Gandhi had used in India.
And he's at Overland one day and
encounters Martin Luther King,
they were both visiting,
and King realized
that Lawson had this
set of experiences
and he said you're exactly
what we need in the South.
And so Lawson came to Nashville,
he teamed up with a very
important minister here named
Kelly Miller Smith,
who was the pastor
of the largest black
church here.
And Lawson said I want to start
doing workshops in nonviolence,
and Smith is the one who
said John Lewis is ready.
Interesting, right?
It's like, oh, God,
my heart is ready.
There's something very Biblical
about John's whole life,
but one thing he wasn't John
Lewis when he was growing up,
he was Robert or
Bob to is family.
And like Abraham, like Elijah,
like Peter he received
a different name
when he received
a different work.
He came to Nashville, he
went to a school on a hill,
went to a mountaintop, you know,
his family was not thrilled
in the early days
about his activism.
So, as Jesus said, you will have
to leave your family to take
up your cross and follow me.
It just, it goes on and on.
And Lawson, meeting in a
basement not far from here,
the Clark Memorial
United Methodist Church,
a little red brick church,
taught John Lewis and Diane Nash
and Bernard Lafayette and James
Bevel how to be nonviolent
and how to fill that tall order.
You're right, that's the tallest
of orders, who wants to do that?
I don't want to do
that, but they did
and they changed a country.
And there's a huge debate,
you know this very well,
there's a huge debate in this
country about the ethicacy
of nonviolence versus more
rigorous forms of protest.
There was a huge debate then.
John Lewis was out of
fashion beginning in 1966
when he lost the Chairmanship
of the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee
to Stokely Carmichael.
So this idea that somehow or
another there was this Brigadoon
like world where everybody
agreed and everybody wore a coat
and tie and they carried their
Bibles, and all the white people
like me said, oh, we
were wrong, so sorry --
that's just not right.
It was touch and go and
complicated and contingent
and conditional, which
is what history is.
But they moved the needle, they
made the Union more perfect,
and it's not perfectible in the
end but they were willing to die
for a country that if it heeded
its better angels would be worth
dying for.
>> Carla Hayden: And that
power of hope, of being able
to gird yourself and move
forward, the epilogue
and his parting words.
And you mentioned that in the
passing of Congressman Lewis
and Justice Ginsberg and so many
other people during this time
that we might never
know with the pandemic,
that there was some comfort
in his afterword though
because he just approaches
it, how to march forward,
the journey begins with
faith, faith in the dignity
and the worth of
every human being.
And I think there's something
brewing in America that's going
to bring people closer
and closer together.
How do you feel about that?
>> Jon Meacham: I
pray that he's right,
and he was always right
more often than I was.
If you live the life he lived
you had to believe that,
as Dr. King said in his
eulogy for the four girls
who were killed in Birmingham
at 16th Street Baptist Church,
he said God can bring good
out of evil, that was the text
that Dr. King returned to.
And if you lived that
life you have to believe
that good can come out of evil.
It's an essential
thing to believe
because oftentimes it seems
that all we've got is evil.
We certainly have a higher
proportion of it than good.
And I don't want to -- this is
not a homily, this is not a 4th
of July oration, I don't mean
to in any way minimize the
complications of these issues,
but it is the fact, a clinical
discernible observable fact
that the world was one
way when John Lewis came
into the public arena and
it was a different world
when he left it.
And isn't that really the test
we should all try to apply
to ourselves, can we make
the world a different
and better place?
And if he could do it, walking
into teargas and Billie clubs
and prison cells from which
he might not have ever left,
if he could do that then
can't the rest of us vote
and speak up and speak out?
Again, I'm not a partisan,
it's just a fundamentally
American thing to do
to say we were devoted to,
we said we were devoted
to an intellectual
and moral proposition
that we were all created equal.
It was a limited definition
then, it is still limited,
but the people we honor,
the people we pay homage
to are the people who
expanded that definition,
not those who constricted it.
And to me one of the lessons
of John Lewis' life is
that if you can broaden
your arms as opposed
to clenching your fists
history will honor you.
>> Carla Hayden: Thank you, Mr.
Jon Meacham, for giving us hope
in history, we really need it.
Thank you.
>> Jon Meacham: Thank you, Dr.
>> Marie Arana: Thanks to
Jon Meacham and Librarian
of Congress, Carla Hayden, for
that stirring conversation.
Before we close this program I'd
like to invite Adrienne Cannon,
the Library's award
winning Specialist
on African-American History,
to join me to tell you a bit
about the Library's holdings
in Civil Rights history.
Adrienne is the primary Curator
for our African-American
collections
and she oversees
the NAACP records,
the largest single collection
ever acquired by the Library
and the most heavily used.
She is Curator of the
current exhibition,
Rosa Parks In Her Own Words.
Adrienne, welcome and thank
you for joining us today.
>> Adrienne Cannon:
Good morning.
>> Marie Arana: Can
you tell us a bit
about the Civil Rights
Era Collections
in the Manuscript Division?
>> Adrienne Cannon: Yes, well,
The Library of Congress
is generally acknowledged
as a leading repository
for the study
of the 20th Century
Civil Rights movement.
The NAACP Records, the largest
single collection ever acquired
by the Library and annually
the most heavily used,
are the cornerstone
of the Library's Civil
Rights resources.
The Manuscript Division also
administers the original records
of the National Urban League,
the NAACP Legal Defense
and Educational Fund,
The Brotherhood
of Sleeping Car Porters,
The Leadership Conference
on Civil Rights, as well
as the microfilm records
of the Congress of
Racial Equality,
the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee,
and the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference.
These resources are enhanced
by the personal papers
of such prominent activists as
Roy Wilkins, Thurgood Marshall,
Arthur Spingarn, A. Philip
Randolph, Bayard Rustin,
Robert L. Carter, Louis
Sullivan, Joseph Rowe,
Mary Church Terrell,
James Forman,
and Rosa Parks, and
Jackie Robinson.
>> Marie Arana: Thank you.
And what other resources
does the Library hold
on the Civil Rights movement?
>> Adrienne Cannon: In addition
to the organizational records
and personal papers
in the Manuscript Division
the Library holds a variety
of formats, such as photographs,
films and sound recordings,
television broadcasts
and radio broadcasts.
The American Folklife Center,
which preserves the oral
histories of individuals
that participated in the Civil
Rights movement firsthand also
holds several collections
of oral histories.
The Library of Congress and
The Smithsonian Institution
collaborated on the Civil
Rights History project,
a Congressional initiative
to survey existing oral
history collections
and added additional interviews.
>> Marie Arana: That's
a lot, it's a lot,
and what materials does
the Library hold pertaining
to John Lewis specifically?
>> Adrienne Cannon: Well,
the James Forman papers,
James Forman was the
Executive Secretary
of the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee,
more commonly known as SNCC,
feature a variety of reports
and memorandums and speeches
that are related to John Lewis.
The most noteworthy
items are the drafts
of John Lewis' 1963 March
on Washington speech.
>> Marie Arana: Right.
>> Adrienne Cannon: The Library
holds the original draft,
as well the draft that
Congressman Lewis delivered
at the podium that day.
And the speech that
was delivered
at the podium was hurriedly
revised by James Forman
and John Lewis in an anteroom
at the back of the statue
of Lincoln at the
Lincoln Memorial
on a portable typewriter
and it is actually written
on the itinerary that was given
to the Cochairs of the March
on Washington, that itinerary
was used as scrap paper.
So if you look you will see
the draft of the speech,
which you can see
is hurriedly written
because there are cross-outs and
there are x's typed over typos,
and then if you look at the
back you'll see the itinerary
for the program.
>> Marie Arana: That's
a lot of material,
and we invite the public to
come and search through it.
It's a wonderful,
wonderful collection.
Adrienne, thank you very much
for connecting this presentation
so firmly to the work that we
do at The Library of Congress.
And a big thanks to all of
you for joining us today.
Remember you can see
more fascinating programs
like this one at
loc.gov/bookfest.
Thanks again.