Taylor Branch Quotations

The history of American patriotism is figuring out ways that we can work together to move forward and knit together the common government.

I think the colleges should be free to give athletes less than a full scholarship, no scholarship and more than a scholarship. And the athletes should be free to bargain.

Martin Luther King was a leader for all Americans on our own professed values.

There are an awful lot of people who despise government precisely because it opened the door for common citizenship for people of all races and all natures in the United States.

I am glad that more of this is coming out. They really show ordinary people making extraordinary history. But I wish it had come out sooner.

He (Johnson) had an amazing spiritual quality about him,

King considered himself, first and foremost, a prophet,

When the Birmingham movement happened, it just stunned me, ... I felt a tiny breath of something very powerful. It changed the whole direction of my life's interest.

This (tape issue) is a tiny fraction of a very complicated, difficult personal subject. I am saying there is a grain of truth in what the FBI said.

But the more information that comes out, the more explicable and human historical events become. The details make the story real.

We just get after 'em. It's the biggest game for both of us.

This era liberated everyone, if you look at the long span of history, beginning with white southerners. Until black people struggled for equal rights, white women couldn't serve on juries. Almost 30 states restricted service. That's so foreign to us today.

There's a tremendous tide of freedom that came out of the civil rights movement,

I don't really mind this although sometimes I get afraid of Willy. I get afraid of his temper. You never know what he's going to do.

The lessons that come from discovery of the Movement's story should point us forward.

There's a natural tendency to sanitize and polish any historical icon whether it be George Washington chopping down the cherry tree or Martin Luther King saying, "I have a dream."

Where race is involved, there is a pronounced and proven tendency in the United States for the majority culture to willfully misremember the history and turn it upside down.

And to me, that's why the civil rights era is about the future, not about the past, because it's great lessons of how citizens can organize to call on the patriotic heritage of the country to tackle some of our most intractable problems and we need to do that again.

History is the key to citizenship.

Truth requires a maximum effort to see through the eyes of strangers, foreigners, and enemies.

Martin Luther King was never an up close and personal figure in the United States.