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By Diane Kennedy-Jackson
Publications Coordinator

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Joseph Scrivner: When someone asked me if I would do this, I said, “Could be, could be not.”

Danny Glover [laughing]: Could be not. As I watched this reel, I thought about my mother, which I often do, my mom and my dad. First let me apologize. I could have worn a suit and tie. But tennis shoes, athletic shoes, felt a little bit more comfortable. I’m not promoting New Balance even though most New Balance shoes are made here in the United States, not overseas. But I remember early in my career, I’d left my job and I worked in community development in city government for six and a half years from June of 1971 till the end of 1977, when I decided that my life was changing and I wanted to try to do something different. I was passionate about the work I did as a community developer with the Model Cities Program and the Office of Community Development, especially with men and women in particular communities, communities that had been disenfranchised, communities that didn’t have a long and stable political history. The way in which they took the moments and began to demonstrate in real life the kind of objectives, the kind of needs and anticipations and possibilities of what could happen in their communities. It was an extraordinary moment in what I call grassroots organic democracy.

And all this emerged simply out of the movements that began long before the civil rights movement, but certainly were nurtured and found their way and development from the movement itself and subsequent movements that came after that. I left the job and I go by my mother’s job. She was a supervisor at the U.S Post Office in San Francisco on Seventh and Mission. I would go by there just to see her extraordinary smile. If you want to understand me, you have to really understand how much my parents meant to me, and meant to all five of us siblings. The first time she saw me was in a community production of “Mice and Men,” and I played a big character, Lenny, in that play. James Earl Jones had played Lenny in New York some time before. So my mother came backstage after the performance. She was looking around surreptitiously and she said: “Son, the people said you can act” (laughing)! So, she had made a survey and listened to what people would say. That’s how precious my mom was. Whenever I would go and see her, and this was like 1979, 1980, I was starving like Marvin. I come up just to see her smile, and she said: “Come on, Danny, I want you to come and meet some of my employees.”

So what happened was she would begin the conversation, “My son Danny, he’s an actor.” And it was if she had a new word in her vocabulary: ACTOR. And then she would say: “Oh, he’s an actor” and just before they could say, “What has he done?” she would say, “Oh, he hasn’t done anything yet, but one day he’s going to do something important.” Only my mother.

I just want to thank Ed (Mullins) for the introduction. When I looked at this, and you look at it from a vantage point Ed mentioned, “Places in the Heart,” and my work in “Places in the Heart” is dedicated to my mother. Unfortunately, the same day I was told I would do the role, my mother died in an automobile accident, that same day. So I got that extraordinary news, and then I had to go and identify her body because my dad was so devastated. So I had to get on a plane, go to Grant, New Mexico, to identify the body and everything else. It’s so typical, because I had three nephews in the back seats, and one brother in the front. No one else got a scratch. Iwas like my mom said: “Lord, if I had to leave, don’t hurt my babies.” That was her. She was the epitome of all that. In that sense, I think a great deal of what I’m about is about my parents. I talked about it, I talked around the table, so much was about my parents, who they were, how I watched them as parents, young adults. And certainly, the things they identified that were important in life were also those things I found myself attached to.

As a child, I remember watching the Montgomery Bus Boycott on television. Television was a new phenomenon. I’m 71 years old, and it was a new phenomenon. In some ways, I was gauging not only my own response to that, but I had the validation of my parents and the way in which they celebrated and embraced the moment as well. They worked at the U.S Post Office in 1948, and they were very much involved, in not only the local but national alliance of postal employees. The demographics had changed in most places, probably here as well, where African-Americans were hired to come to the post office. My dad had been a veteran in the army during World War II and there were certain special considerations for that as well. But all those things kind of defined my early life. And then, a movement happened that found itself engaging not only to veterans.

We talk about Dr. King here today, but Dr. King would talk about the enormous mobilization that occurred around these movements. We must look at the civil rights movements as a continuum of the struggle for justice. From the time the first slaves arrived here, whether through the abolitionist movement [and] the struggle after the emancipation proclamation and the civil war and reconstruction. I think one of the extraordinary books to read is the W.E.B, Du Bois’ “Black Reconstruction in America.” It’s an enormous study where it refutes all the various lies they were told about African-Americans’ contribution to reconstruction, the introduction of public education, not only for black children, but all children, for poor white children as well.

So, the civil rights struggle was about Ida B. Wells, the great writer and great journalist who organized an anti-lynching campaign in 1896, the year of Plessy vs. Ferguson. I think of Dr. King as a continuum of that struggle. I was talking to students about when I went to Howard Law School some years ago. They have two floors dedicated for all those classes that graduated from 1896 to 1954.

Plessy vs. Ferguson, Brown vs. Board of Education — so all those kind of things when I felt in my mom, my mom who would always tell us children, part of my moral underpinning, what she said “I’m eternally grateful for my mother and father.” Her mother and father — my grandfather was born in 1892, my grandmother in 1895. They both saw “The Color Purple” and they lived to be 99 years old (applause). And when she said, “I’m eternally grateful for my mother and father. I didn’t pick cotton in September. I went to school in September.” She was grateful because my grandparents made enormous sacrifices to send all three of their children to school in September. Consequently, my mother graduated from Paine College in Augusta, Georgia in 1942. Ironically and so prophetically, her grandmother and my great-grandmother Mary Brown, the family matriarch. She was born in 1853, freed by the emancipation proclamation.

So it is a journey, and I think what has helped me throughout my life and throughout my career is that I’m a part of the journey much larger than me, much bigger than me, and much bigger than just African-Americans, not simply just African-American. When King talked about his work, he said, “I’m not simply in the business of — and I’m paraphrasing — integrating African-Americans. I’m trying to save this country’s soul.” He made that very clear. So when we talk about his legacy, we talked about Dr. King’s legacy, and realizing the dream, is that how do we save this country’s soul (applause).

Every time that I think about the profound wisdom and love, love, when Dr. King talked about the beloved community, with his speeches. I told the students in his speech “Beyond Vietnam.” He uses this from John 4:12, “Nobody’s ever seen God, but if we love each other, God lives in us.”

We got to love. Love is transformative. It’s not how many toys we get, how many trinkets, how much technology, it’s love. And hopefully in future generations that becomes the profound way in which we express real change (applause).

 

Joseph Scrivner: I tried to resist “The Color Purple” references as I thought about tonight. But I remember when “The Color Purple” came out, and I remember some of the backlash, about the presentation of African-American men. Given the issues that Alice Walker dealt with in her novel that are presented in the film, “The Color Purple,” and given more recent events about sexual harassment, the #metoo movement, how do you think those things vindicate what “The Color Purple” tried to deal with, first as a novel and then a movie, which you bravely and courageously play a difficult character to portray and present?

 

Danny Glover: I think, I don’t think that Alice Walker or the film or the book needed any vindication at all. And I would have been really dismayed if there had not been such a vibrant, discourse in communities, in cities. I was in Chicago during the play, right through the midst of that, and everywhere there was a conversation about “The Color of Purple.” I would have been dismayed if there hadn’t been that kind of conversation. Because we have to also deal with the way in which African-Americans are portrayed, from the very beginning, from before films, and everything else through the kind of stereotypical images that we saw around that they represented. But we also deal with that we are human beings too, you know, we are subject to the violence, all the other things. That doesn’t make it become the identity of an entire race. But like anybody else, we are human beings, in a process where every single one of us needs some ways in which we heal with each other. Men, whether they are white, black, Asian, whatever their color, brown, men have issues with women. That’s been historic in some sense, that has been a historical phenomenon. On the one hand, if we evolve and clearly create the path toward building some sort of transformative community, world, country, we are going to have to come to terms with that, absolutely without a doubt.

So in the sense that I felt the conversation was healthy and it was needed and from both vantage points, how the industry itself, the industry which creates identities, the industry which in some sense of uses and perpetuates certain identities at the expense of others as well. And I think at that point in time we needed that kind of discussion about that. Did it exactly change the issue? No. We talked about the violence against black women. The violence against black women goes back to slavery, absolutely. Do we have to do that? What did (James) Baldwin say? “We are not able to live with our truths.” If we cannot live with our truth and our true path, we are trapped in it. So in some sense, in every facet of our history, in our lives, me, as a man of African descent, those of European decent, we have to deal with the truth of our history. We cannot push it aside, I’m surprised, when I read [Douglas A.] Blackmon’s book — Blackmon is from Alabama — “Slavery by Another Name,” I knew that story. I knew the songs, Sam Cook sang the song: “Working on the Chain Gang.” I knew that story. We know where blues come from, and everything as well. We knew those stories. But Blackmon said, “Wait a minute, the narrative that I have been a part of my life growing up in Alabama, there is something wrong with this narrative. Let me do some investigation, let me do some truth seeking.”

And that’s what he did. He did the truth seeking. He said, “Wait, this pattern of criminalizing black men. That’s real!” “Joe Turner’s Come and Cone.” August Wilson’s play. The center of that play is about Herald Loomis, who comes up to Pittsburgh looking for his daughter after he had taken off the street, had not been in contact with his wife and daughter, and cast in some sort of world for seven years in which he was a slave in some sense. So all those kind of things are true parts of history. So what it is? Brian Stevenson is opening in April in Montgomery a lynching museum to talk about the issues of lynchings and violence. And all these are real parts of our history [that we cannot ignore]. The process in different forms continues, and I think that’s all we’ve said and that’s what women are saying right now. So, hopefully, despite that we have had a women’s movement, a women’s liberation movement, and everything else, hopefully, we will understand on so many levels the abuse of power, abuse of gender power in all aspects and those who are most affected and those who are also still victimized by it (applause).

 

Joseph Scrivner: I didn’t know, until I was preparing for this, that you led or participated in a protest at San Francisco State in the sixties as a student, and you were part of a five-month strike until they agreed to have a Black Studies Department. Was that your first real engagement with activism? Was there a moment when you decided you were going to jump in and be a part of it? What do you recall about that, and how has it been a part of your activism since then?

 

Danny Glover: It’s very interesting. I was talking about San Francisco, such a relatively small black population, and they define communities they lived in. I remember there is a place in a community in San Francisco referred to as Harlem West, and that’s in the Fillmore District; it’s a traditionally black community in San Francisco, right adjacent to Japantown, the Japanese community at the same time. So you have these two communities connected to each other. In the forties and fifties, Louis Armstrong was there and Duke Ellington. The Count Basie band played at the Booker T. Washington Hotel because San Francisco had segregated places that black people could stay. So, my first involvement was when I about nineteen or twenty years old. We know about this, we have this period of re-development of these communities, and San Francisco’s housing stock is really pretty old in the sense. A lot of the houses had not been burned down by the 1906 earthquake were Queen Ann’s, Victorian’s Queen Ann’s and Edwardian, built before the turn of the twentieth century and right after the turn of the twentieth century.

So I got involved in that, because what’s so fascinating about the engagement that it was multiracial in that. And I was nineteen or twenty years old. Those were the first meetings I had gone to, going to those meetings and listening to that. What was so amazing was that my dad accompanied me to some of those meetings early on. So we go in and people were trying to say how do we empower ourselves at this moment when we see that we were powerless in what was happening. [So under the leadership of a Japanese American] a lot us went to those meetings at the YMCA and men, women, families, workers came collectively came together in the service of saying “how can we empower ourselves in that moment?” I happened to come out San Francisco State at the moment of extraordinary activism. A number of students had been working in the South, working in Mississippi and Alabama, and everything else. They were migrating back to school and they came to San Francisco. Mario Savio, who started the Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley, was part of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee down in Mississippi. So they came back and they were activists. So these activists were on campus at the time. They were not only political activists, they were artists as well.

We started a community communication project, which included drama, poetry, dance and music. The idea was how do we engage the community. So that’s the first thing that I was involved in as a student, and the first time I ever stepped up on a stage as well. I had never been on a stage. Anybody told you I was at the church play, they fabricated something. My mom said you couldn’t get me to say two words together at that age. Then in the fall of 1967, we invited Nathan Hare, a professor of history and black studies at Howard University. We invited him out for a year. And we began to develop what we thought should be a Black Studies Program. And all of us, this cadre of men and women that I was around at the time, we read extensively.

By 1970, we were reading poets and artists, talking about all these different kind of artists. We wanted to include all of that. So it wasn’t any African American studies, but also the diaspora studies as well, and the connection between the two. And so we began to develop of that, and we talked to the President [John Henry] Summerskill, who was a liberal, spent time in Africa, president of San Francisco State. We talked with him about how we can manifest these ideas, and it wasn’t approved, so we called the strike in October–November 1968, a student strike. We didn’t realize that Asian-American students, Hispanic-American students, and the Native-American students, had their own grievances, and they all joined the strike, as well as faculty. So basically, it shut the campus down for five months. It wasn’t just African-Americans. So what emerged out of that, in its forty-ninth year, is the School of Ethnic Studies [College of Ethic Studies today] at San Francisco State. It’s still there, and I’m still engaged with it. But it was part of a process that wasn’t just us. I want to make that very clear because sometimes my fellow classmates would talk about “we did this.” I would say “wait, wait, wait, what made this possible was not simply the fact that it was by people of color, and progressive whites as well. What made it possible was that and the fact that we brought the communities in. We had made those strong connections in our communities, whether it was the Latino community, African-American community. So we made those connections. So we had enormous community support behind that. That’s what made it so successful (applause).

 

Joseph Scrivner: I see this connection for you that you are a truth seeker and a truth teller, both as an actor and as an activist. And you co-founded Louverture Films in 2005. How does that grow out of this past that you shared with us, the work you have done. It sounds like that’s a part of your desire to tell the truth, to present these human truths. Tell us more about that work of yours.

 

Danny: I began watching African films in the mid-seventies. A friend of mine had a film festival in San Francisco, Clyde Taylor, retired NYU professor, the Clyde Taylor Film Festival. So we see all these African-American films. I was just amazed by the content of them most happens post decolonization, new independence, and new images in which they saw themselves. So, I began to meet at … especially when I met Mandela in 1986 … I’ve done about seven films on the content of Africa, “Bopha,” “Mandela,” “Boesman and Lena,” which I did with Angela Bassett, “Bàttu,” and “The Children’s Republic,” a movie I did in Mozambique. I did several films and produced some films on Africa. I was on the set of a film when a friend of mine, who is the minister of culture [of Mali] and a wonderful filmmaker Cheick Oumar Sissoko, and he asked me to do a cameo in his film. And I didn’t know that I was going to meet this woman who is just extraordinary, Joslyn Barnes, writer and producer. And if you know about the writing in the twenties, Djuna Barnes, who was her great aunt, had the galleys of James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” which is one of the great pieces of literature ever written. She gave it to her great niece and Joslyn said, “I don’t think any human being should own this,” so she donated this in the name of her great aunt to the University of Maryland, where her papers are. We started talking about the Haitian Revolution. I read a book called the “Black Jacobins,” by C.L.R. James, a Marxist historian and one of the great historians of the 20^th century. He looks at the Haitian Revolution in relationship to the French Revolution. There are three revolutions that happened in 15 years — 1776, the American revolution; 1789, the French Revolution; and in 1791, the Haitian Revolution, but nobody’s talking about the Haitian Revolution.

And there’s a little bit of history too, because I fancy myself as a historian to some extent. So the Haitians defeat Napoleon’s army in Haiti, led by his brother-in-law [Charles Victoire Emmanuel] Leclerc, in 1803, and by January 1^st 1804, they formed their own nation. Napoleon, so desperate for money, sells a piece of land for $13 million dollar, something called the Louisiana Purchase. You never knew why he was doing that, because he was so desperate for money. People never knew about that. It was a gift to this country, because Jefferson was simply interested and fascinated with New Orleans. So they sold the whole thing to them. And because of the revolt of these Haitian slaves, which defeated the largest Armada, the largest group of assembled armies in history till that time and defeated them soundly. I was fascinated by that story and everything else. So when I met Joslyn Barnes, the first day we are on the set in Dakar, Senegal, late at night, all night, shooting a night scene, and that’s all we talked about. That was in 1999 and we haven’t stopped talking since.

We have a film that’s now on the short list for Oscars this year, it’s called “Strong Island.” It’s on Netflix and it’s quite extraordinary. Just last night, at the awards ceremony in New York, it won all the major awards in documentary film awards. It’s by Yance Ford. And we’ve had success with “Soundtrack for a Revolution.” Someone I was just talking to said that their niece worked on the “Soundtrack for a Revolution.” [It’s about] the music of the civil rights movement sung by contemporary artists John Legend, Mary Mary, Richie Havens, and The Blind Boys of Alabama.

We produced a movie that was mentioned about the war on drugs called “The House I Live in” by director Eugene Jarecki, who directed a documentary film called “Why We Fight.” The first time out was a movie called “Bamako,” which is about the Africa debt crisis, a narrative from a brilliant young director from Mali. We produced the film called “Trouble the Water,” which got a nomination for an Oscar about ten years ago and it’s about New Orleans and behind the scenes of what happened with Hurricane Katrina. So those are the kind of works that we produce.

“Toussaint” and the Haitian Revolution is still the film that we want to see done, but in the meantime, we’ve done foreign films as well. We did a film called “White Sun,” which is done by a young director from Nepal. We produced an Argentinian film called “Zama,” which came out this year and looks at pre-colonial period at the end of the 18^th century in Argentina. And it has been a platform for a great deal of discussion in Argentina about that period because it’s been done by a really talented filmmaker Lucrecia Martel. And now we want to produce a film about an Adivasi artist. We are looking to do (a film on) Jangarh Singh [Jangarh Singh Shyam, a contemporary artist]. That’s the kind of work that we do.

Joseph Scrivner: Thank you. It looks like you focus on stories that are not told often and people don’t really know.

Danny Glover: Stories essentially — we’ve done primarily documentaries but we’ve also done narratives as well. Quincy Jones was a big, big force in getting “The Color Purple” done. Oprah was a big force in getting the “Beloved” done. And since you are always trying to figure out what do you want to do, what work do you want to do, and I’ve been fortunate to have Joslyn Barnes to learn and grow from.

Joseph Scrivner: I’ve been given the signal that we are about out of time, but I’d like to have one last question for you. I think people have a tendency, with cable television and the Internet, to just sit and become resigned. To shake their heads, what does it mean, what can we do? Given your years of experience in activism, if you could encourage us, briefly, encourage us and tell us to find the thing that we can do to counter whatever negative forces are around us, what would you say to us?

Danny Glover: I have had the pleasure to spend about 15 years around someone who died just a few years ago, at 100 years old, in Detroit. Her name is Grace Lee Boggs. She was married to an African-American, she’s Chinese-American, married to an African-American named [James] “Jimmy” Boggs. Jimmy Boggs was from Alabama. He went to Detroit, became active as a union organizer and a progressive. Always thinking about the world and changing the world. So, you have this union of this African-American man and this Chinese-American woman, and they were dynamite. They spent a lot of time around Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, and they would go on to do things together.

And they talked about revolution evolution ­— the process of this is, what time is it on the world’s clock right now? Well, we see this happening not simply in the United States, but around the world. We look at issues of climate change, there are things that we can do and we can fight those things. And [also] global warming — even though we see the manifestations of those in places like Florida, Texas and all over, or a minus 100 wind-chill factor in New Hampshire just last week — we understand that and we have to find something [to do about it].

And they talk also about sustainable activism. If I’m thinking about Dr. King and his own evolution, because the Dr. King we saw on August 28th, 1963, is not the same Dr. King we saw right here working on behalf of sanitation workers, April 4^th, 1968. It’s not the same Dr. King. When he received the Nobel Peace Prize, he talked about this being a world house, he uses that platform. When he talks about war, he connects war, race, and materialism — prophetic. This was in 1968, 50 years ago he talked about that.

How do we see ourselves. How can we, in ourselves, in our communities, create transformative relationships — the communities of love, a beloved community, God beloved. How do we create that? How do we work toward that? When you work toward something, you begin to have a vision of what the possibilities are. How do we do that? Those are the kind of things that I think about in terms of telling our communities, whether it’s on a campus or whether it’s in a community.

You know, I live in the city of San Francisco, California. Well, I don’t recognize the city anymore. I’ve lived in the same neighborhood since I was 11years old, 60 years. I’ve made trips here and in New York doing the theater and everything but [only] briefly. But I don’t know what that community looks like, I don’t know what that community is. People have moved out through gentrification, and through the “market” — when does a “market” become a disservice to who we are as human beings? (applause) When does a market become a disservice to who we are?

And the first question in philosophy is what — what does it mean to be a human being? Second question is how do you know. And how you know is by what we do in the service of being a human being. So, I think about that. And listen, we have to do what we know, we have to understand. Baldwin said — and I’m paraphrasing — “if we don’t understand our past, we are trapped, and trapped in it.” And if we don’t realize it — we don’t face the truth — not understand and face the truth through our past, we are trapped in it. And what is that past, what is the truth of our past that leads us to our future?

Joseph Scrivner: Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Danny Glover (applause).

It is a real honor tonight to be here with you. I really appreciate all of you being here because before we were coming down, we were watching television news and they announced that the national championship trophy was going to be on display in Tuscaloosa, and you can have your picture made with it at Target.

My lovely wife Louise, who is here with me tonight, looked at me and said, “Oh Lord, nobody’s going to show up.” Which was really her polite way of saying “I’d rather have something else to do in Tuscaloosa tonight.”

I would like to mention one regret that I have tonight is that some dear friends are not able to be here. Many of you may have known Becky and Melford Espy, long time and dear friends of mine. Both passed away a few years ago. Becky taught me social studies in the seventh grade and Mel was a counselor in high school when I was a student, and I owe them a lot, and I miss them and I know if they had been able to be here tonight, they would be here on the front row beaming proudly for someone they helped raised back in Fairfield, Alabama.

I’m also especially glad to be here tonight because you are honoring one of my dear friends and heroes, Bill Baxley. You will hear more about Baxley, but truly in 1970, when I was just 16 and he was only 28 years old, he was elected as Alabama’s Attorney General. I’m absolutely convinced that in 1978 if this state had elected him governor, we would be a far different state today.

I do quickly want to make one correction in your program though, because the program says that Bill was best known for his work in prosecuting the Chambliss case, which was the other 16th Street bombing case. He’s actually known very well for that, but what he’s best known for is something that is connected to the case. You see, when Bill, a great politician when he was in office, used to get all this mail he would answer all this mail. But during the investigation and trial of that case, he got a lot hate mail.

You can imagine in the early 70’s the kind of hate mail that came into his office. One in particular came in from Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon Edward R. Fields, who was the National States Rights Party president from Atlanta. Bill showed me a copy of it, and it was awful. I mean, it was a three-page diatribe about how bad an individual Bill Baxley is, called him everything under the sun, including a disgrace to his race for prosecuting these “good white Anglo-Saxon Christian men.” But like all the great politicians, Bill responds to his letters, and this is what he wrote: “My response to your letter of February 19, 1976, is — kiss my ass.” True story folks, true story.

Bill and I travel together a lot, talking about the prosecutions of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing cases. I have been fortunate enough not only to travel with Bill, but also to travel throughout the state and country lecturing on those cases and the history behind them. Dr. Mullins and I were talking about this a moment ago. I have always been fascinated to see how important it is for people to learn about what happened in Birmingham in 1963, and how we came to prosecute two former Klansmen almost forty years later.

Folks seem to want to touch a piece of history, which I truly believe is history that is not adequately taught in our schools today. You see, people know the big picture, they know the events, they know about Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954. they know and have heard about the Freedom Riders in 1961, they know about the children’s march and in 1963 the fire hoses and the dogs and the stand in the school house door in Tuscaloosa and the march on Washington, and yes, the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church.

But for my legal team, as prosecutors, we had to connect all those events, connect the dots, if you will, to explain why it came to past that the 16th Street Baptist Church was targeted for a Klan bomb, and maybe even children targeted for death. So, let me explain just briefly about that.

In 1954, the Brown vs. Board of Education decision declared that separate schools are unequal schools, and the schools should desegregate with all deliberate speed. I don’t have to tell you the history of the “separate but equal” doctrine in schools in this country. But desegregation didn’t happen with all deliberate speed; it took decades. And in 1957, Fred Shuttlesworth decided to enroll his children in all-black Phillips High School in Birmingham, but he was met with a mob of white people and beaten. He and his wife were both beaten and chased up and down the sidewalks. One of the people in that crowd was an individual named Bobby Cherry. He felt so compelled to violence to stop school desegregation, that he would beat up a man of the cloth, a man of faith, Fred Shuttlesworth.

Then you have the 1961 freedom riders, and Bull Connor allows the Klan to have their way with the freedom riders. Police officers didn’t show up at the Greyhound bus station for some 20 minutes. But because of what happened to the freedom riders, Birmingham business leaders decided to change the form of government. It took them a while to get a change, but all of a sudden in the fall of 1962 the Birmingham city government changed from a three-member commission that included Bull Connor, to a mayor and city council. So they had an election. But at the same time, Reverend Shuttlesworth was in Atlanta talking to Dr. King to come to Birmingham to desegregate the most segregated city in America.

And the children’s marches took place just after the election. Bull Connor lost the mayor’s race but he stayed in the office. When all the marches were settled, and you’ve seen the pictures of the fire hoses and the dogs and the kids streaming out of schools to participate. When that was resolved with modest change to Birmingham, the Klan was not happy. And they responded the the only way the Klan knew how to respond and that was with violence.

A.D. King’s house was bombed shortly thereafter. The Klan was seeing their segregated way of life sliding away and they didn’t like it. In the children’s marches, it wasn’t just the children who were the symbols of the movement, but also the 16th Street Baptist Church, because that’s where they would meet. So now the Klan was unhappy and guess what: The 16th Street Baptist Church and the children were the symbols of the movement. The stand in the school house door made them angrier. They never dreamed that George Wallace would actually step aside. They didn’t know that it was just a charade all staged for his political career. Later that summer, bombs continued to blow up in Birmingham. Arthur Shores’ home was bombed twice.

In August was the “I Have a Dream” speech, and everyone thought that things were looking up.

It was a positive atmosphere, but in Birmingham the desegregation of Birmingham city schools was about to take place. Court ordered the desegregation of Birmingham city schools. Five days before the bombing of the church, young men and women walked into elementary and junior high schools to desegregate the Birmingham schools for the first time. And Birmingham was on edge.

Because so much violence over the years had occurred as a result of school desegregation, I don’t think it was coincidence that five days later the marquee outside the church was advertising a youth worship service that targeted the youth, and the children were coming to that church together again. That’s the weekend that it was targeted for a bombing. So the jury understood it, and the jury got it.

And it’s only by connecting the dots of history that people come to fully understand what was happening in this state and in this country. It’s only by connecting the dots today that we can measure how far we have come as a society, how far we have come to realize Dr. King’s dream that he so eloquently talked about on the mall in Washington.

Now certainly as has been discussed earlier, we had made enormous strides in race relations and equality, in civil rights and in human rights. Legally mandated social, racial segregation in Alabama and the South had been dismantled. The field of education had seen huge improvements. While just under 26 percent of black adults age 25 and older had completed four years of high school in 1964, the percentage had increased to 85 percent by 2012. The number of African-American college undergraduates has increased 10-fold since 1964. Infant mortality in the black community has dropped dramatically, although I think we still have a ways to go in Alabama.

African-Americans have come to occupy positions of power and influence from boardrooms to the State House and the White House. But it’s very easy, and especially at events like this, to talk about how far we have come, to mix and mingle and to pose for pictures and celebrate. We should celebrate, congratulate ourselves on our success. But it’s real easy to never have the conversations that we must have about race in this country, never even trying to connect the dots about what is happening in this state and in this country that is eroding the true fulfillment of Dr. King’s dream.

A few years ago, I was struck by the final passages of an editorial in the Anniston Star following the death of Bobby Frank Cherry, one of the individuals I prosecuted. He’d died in an Alabama prison where he had been in since the conviction. The Star wrote: “Cherry represented the banality of evil in a time when it was more common than we like to admit. It is easy to look back on those times and see the militant racial hatred that consumed him had no place in a civil society then and certainly does not now. It’s much more difficult to confront the shadows of racism and prejudice that surround us in the present. It comes in subtle forms. There is rarely a fuse that gets lit. It’s more of a slow burn. But make no mistake, its flames are just as consuming as those that raged inside Bobby Frank Cherry.”

Like so many Americans, I believed with the election of Barack Obama we had finally moved past so much of our racial divides, not necessarily a completely post-racial world or whatever that term is. But we have really moved beyond having race so prominent in our everyday lives. Not that we have eliminated racism, but that race would not be as dominant a factor as it had been, at least in my lifetime. I remember on a really remarkable occasion on the night of election in 2008 I had gone to the Boutwell Auditorium in Birmingham, which was the site of the beating of Nat King Cole in the fifties. It was the site of the Dixiecrat Convention in 1948, but on that night in November, it was the site of a victory party with the election of Barack Obama. And it was a raucous occasion, to say the least.

And I stayed and I enjoyed it, and it was awesome and as I am leaving, the party is still going on. I walk across a street, and I meet a friend that I had known for a while who’s been around in Alabama politics a long time, Billy Joe Camp. And I talk to Billy Joe, and we talked about that night, how exciting it was, and I say, “Well, I got to go to another party.” As I walked away I turned because it struck me as he also walked toward that party that I was just watching the former press secretary to the late Governor George Wallace going to a victory party for the first black president of the United States.

So, yeah, folks, we have come a long way.

But if there is one thing I have learned from Bill Baxley (and it’s a lot more than that): You kind of just tell things like it is, And unfortunately the election of President Obama appears what I hoped to have been a watershed was simply a high-water mark rather than lasting change, because with his election and since his election we have seen a consistent and disturbing erosion of civil rights in this country. It is everywhere and racial bigotry and prejudice are continuing to rise; you all know it.

As we sit here tonight, you all know it. It’s not necessarily talked about as much as it should be, but it needs to be, and frankly, it is being talked about more. We have economic disparity and the wealth gap is growing. Our schools tend to be more segregated today than they’ve ever been in the last fifty years. Law enforcement and the criminal justice system continue to struggle with racial issues. We have seen it all too often in the last couple of years where unarmed young black men are killed by police. And I’m not trying to dis the police because they do an incredible job, but there’s got to be some change. There’s got to be some change in the way we do things.

The access to the ballot box by minorities is getting harder and harder. Through various state laws, whether it’s voter ID laws or others, access to the most fundamental freedom that we have, the freedom to vote, is being challenged every day, and especially in a state like Alabama where we have a budget crisis and all of a sudden it seems to be used to close the ID-getting places, the Department of Motor Vehicle offices in the Black Belt, where Democratic voters happen to be.

I promised Louise I wouldn’t get too political. If I do she’ll throw a cheesecake at me. And in the case of Shelby County vs. Holder, the Supreme Court of the United States stripped the Voting Rights Act of a critical provision used by the Justice Department to ferret out voting rights abuses before they take effect. And then across college campuses, from one end of the country to the other, minority students are once again finding their voices, rising up to express their concern and frustration with racism that they are experiencing on their campuses.

Right here in Tuscaloosa, one of your honorees tonight, the second African-American to be elected SGA president at the University, has felt compelled to participate in a video to shine a light on the problems that he sees. Now those problems are not being sufficiently taught at the University of Alabama and other places. They’re not happening just in this state, but other places where parents and teachers and ministers are not doing the job of teaching people about justice and truth and reconciliation.

Now, the last thing I need to do tonight is to give you some kind of laundry list of things that have happened in this country over the last few years. You instinctively know what I’m talking about: the erosion of civil rights and the rise of bigotry. What I hope you will do, not just tonight, but every day, is to connect the dots of what you see and hear going on around you, from Tuscaloosa to Montgomery to Washington, D.C. to see what is happening in Alabama and throughout the country, and connect the dots to what you know in your hearts is happening.

I believe that the rhetoric of our political figures fans the flames of bigotry and prejudice. We have seen that history in this state, and sometimes in today’s world, I think they fan those flames even when they don’t intend to. You know, George Wallace never used the “N” word in public but he fanned the flames of hate and bigotry with code words and fear. In those days, the hate was directed toward the black community and the involvement of the federal government. But in part as a result of our ever-growing diversity in this state and country, today’s rhetoric seems to be directed at much broader and much more diverse segments of our population: African-Americans, Latinos, the LGBT community, Muslims. If you don’t look like them, talk like them, or worship like them, lot of people just hate them, and we’ve got to work on that, we’ve got to do something, and make no mistake: Today’s politicians, in my view, are taking a page from the playbooks of the past, in which leaders continue to resist the growing movement of civil and human rights in the state and in this country.

You remember from your old civic lessons the terms “nullification” and “interposition” used by Southern politicians to attempt to override acts of Congress and the decisions of the United States Supreme Court. Well today, we have a State Chief Justice who believes that his views of morality override decisions of the United States Supreme Court, and he tells probate judges throughout Alabama “just ignore the law, they are wrong, so just ignore them.” That, ladies and gentlemen, is a problem, and if you don’t think that’s a throw-back to the civil rights era, look and compare the two.

In this state, we are in a fiscal crisis; we’ve been that way for couple of years through lot of reasons, and I’m not going to just blame the folks in Montgomery now. This has been building up a long time. But even today we spend thousands, tens of thousands of dollars, on legal fees defending an indefensible immigration bill that was simply attempted to override the constitutional authority of the United States government. Everyone agrees that our immigration system is badly flawed, but when a sponsor of that bill seems to conflate the term “illegals” with the term “Mexicans” we got a problem.

And at this point, there is just not much need for me to go into that hateful rhetoric we are hearing from Donald Trump. Republicans from one end of the country to the other are doing that for me. You’ve heard it and you’ve seen it. But I will say this, I am concerned about one aspect after I hear this from some of the political commentators who were talking about Trump’s rhetoric, and even though they will note the criticism, they then come back and say “Well, Mr. Trump seems to be just tapping in to what so many people believe.” That is true; people believe that way. You see it in the turnout that he has. That’s the sad part, that there are people that actually still believe that and applaud him. You know our political leaders need to lead, our political leaders need to be more like Bill Baxley who took a chance on the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing case in the 1970s, who took a chance cleaning up the environment in Birmingham, going against big business in the seventies when it wasn’t popular. Our leaders need to lead. When there are fundamental wrongs in the minds of folks, they need to be the ones to lead the change and translate it into public policy.

Chris Christy, the governor of New Jersey, said at the Republican convention a few years ago, “Leaders should not just follow polls, leaders need to move polls.” I wish Governor Christy, and the others on that stage, would follow his advice. And we need to demand more of our candidates and our elected officials. They need to know that Dr. King’s dream is not just for rich white guys in this country. Dr. King’s dream encompassed everybody of all races, all religions, all ages, all sexual orientations. You name it, it encompassed everybody.

There are a couple of areas specifically that I would like to talk about just briefly that I’m working on that concern me, that I believe are a function of some problems that we’ve got both in race and civil rights and civil justice, areas that I think are desperate for change in which I also believe that there is some opportunity for bipartisan support. The first is with the payday lending practices in the state, outrageous interest rates of over 450 percent in most instances. Think about that, you’ve probably got credit cards, you have loans, you have credit cards that you complain about 20 percent — but 450 percent! That law was changed in 2003 to change the usury laws that allow these people to charge these outrageous rates, make millions of dollars on the backs of the poor and the working class families in the state.

Last year they started keeping some tabs on these loans. In a 10-week period, 450,000 of those loans were taken out by your neighbors in the State of Alabama. Think about that, we are a state of about four million people and 450,000 of those loans were taken out in a ten-week period, and these are not loans for people that are trying to feed a gambling habit, or drug habit, or even for emergencies like their car was broken down or their child was sick. These are loans the studies show that are taken out by people who are just trying to meet everyday expenses. Now, a bill is going to be introduced in the Legislature again — one was introduced last year that never got the light of day — for Alabama to end this practice, to cap the interest rates at around 36 percent, which is still high, but what an improvement if we could do it.

So please contact your state legislators, contact your representatives, ask them to do something positive for the poor and the working-class folks in this state. And when you do, remember this, and we had a program about this at our church in Birmingham at Canterbury the other day. Remember when you are complaining about the payday lenders, remember that there are victims of payday lenders, these people taking out those loans, because think about it: If 450,000 people have to take out those loans to meet everyday expenses, what does that really say about our state and what does it say about the leadership in our state who don’t seem to care as much for the tired, the poor, the huddled masses.

I told them the other night, I want to work hard to knock payday lending vultures off, but it’s kind of like picking off that vulture that’s beginning to pick on a wounded rabbit. You can shoot that vulture, but if you walk away from the wounded victim, you’ve really not accomplished an awful lot. So we need to work to make sure we do that.

The second area is in criminal justice reform. Recently, I have been working with the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University Law School with about 150 law enforcement leaders and prosecutors from all 50 states, calling for changes in our criminal justice system through an initiative called the Law Enforcement Leaders to Reduce Crime and Incarceration.

Today, the most civilized country in the world has the highest rate of imprisonment in the world. The United States has 5 percent of the world’s population, but 25 percent of the world prisoners, we spend $80 billion annually to lock people up, and in so many cases it’s simply just not necessary. Unnecessary incarceration hurts our communities in so, so many ways.

Now, let’s make no mistake, I’m all for law and order. I have been a prosecutor at two different times in my life. I defend people, but I’m all about the rule of law and order, but I also know there is just simply a lot of unnecessary incarceration that puts people away and treats them like animals. And when you do that, it hurts the communities by furthering racial disparities. It exacerbates the economic impact in inequality of communities. It fuels recidivism and hinders the economic development in communities that need it the most.

Today, and I know you’ve heard these statistics, today, one in three black men will end up in incarcerated at some point in their life; 60% of prisoners reentering society face long term unemployment. With restricted economic opportunities, criminal activities increase. The Law Enforcement Leaders to Reduce Crime and Incarceration have put forth a series of proposals that I hope will be given a good look by law enforcement and state legislators and members of Congress.

I won’t go into all of them, but they are talking about engaging communities, we are talking about alternatives to our arrests, alternatives to incarceration for nonviolent offenders, not the violent offenders. And I want to make sure, as I said a minute ago about my history, these 150 folks are not some bleeding hearts here. They are tough on crime law-enforcement officers who have spent their careers in law enforcement and protecting the communities and when you are a foot soldier for law enforcement, you learn a lot about what’s going on the streets, so these are well reasoned. Being tough on crime and being smart on crime are not incompatible.

This morning, as I was getting ready to go to work, I saw the news about the rise in the homicides in Tuscaloosa, something that bothers everyone. And when you are trying to talk about reducing crime through changes in the system, it’s hard when you know there are certain statistics out there that seem fly in the face of what you are saying. But I will tell you that studies will show that there is not necessarily the same correlation between locking people up and throwing away the key and reducing the crime. But what I saw this morning, I thought was important. I saw your police chief on the TV, discussing the rise of homicides in Tuscaloosa. But rather than simply giving the tough guy law and order speech, he talked about community involvement, he talked about engagement of the community, and education of both the community and the leaders of this community. That is exactly the type of approach that can have long-term effects and you should be proud of your chief for articulating those in the media.

So, ladies and gentlemen, you know I know our theme is “Realizing the Dream,” and so many dreams have been realized, but we have so, so far to go. For me, I go back to the case that will forever define me. And I think forever defines Bill, because it is more than for us than just simply about history. You know, when a child is killed, scores of other lives are shattered. The loss of those four young girls at the church in Birmingham, Alabama, and the two boys who died later that day from gun fire in Birmingham created a deep crater of remorse in 1963. It woke up the conscience of America, the conscience of the president, the conscience of Congress.

But around that well of grief, something incredible has grown. Lives have been saved and countless more, mine among them, have been enriched. The blast of 16th Street Baptist Church shook us out of a stupor. It was easy to see that things had to change. It was an alarm to warn about the creep of a smothering darkness that only could be repelled by fundamental change in America.

I have learned much from the bombing investigation and trials, from people like Bill, people like Mary Jolley, Cleo, my colleague at Alabama. I’ve learned a lot about my city in Birmingham, my state and my country, the law, our people, good and bad, the dangerous absurdity of racial prejudice and the terrorism facilitated by divisiveness.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, was exactly what the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing was, an act of terrorism, before that word was really a part of our vocabulary as it is today. In the years since the trials, I have started to realize that we are repeating many of the same mistakes from a half century ago. Sometimes that connection is only evident if you are prepared to look past the mask of dog whistle politics, the posturing of about economics or expose those hiding behind religion and political bluster. At other times, it hits like a sledge hammer, as with the Charleston church shootings in June of 2015.

The Charleston church shootings raised an interesting piece, something I want to share, because as we’ve talked about politicians and their words, we know words have meanings, whether you say it or not, the words have meaning. Well, the symbols have meanings too, and it took the deaths of nine people in a church in Charleston, South Carolina for people to wake up and realize that the Confederate battle flag has no place in this society.

And I want to show you something real quick. For any of you out there, whoever are talking to someone who said that I don’t necessarily agree with taking down the flag because it’s really a symbol of history, it’s a symbol of Southern heritage. Despite the fact the heritage is Confederate heritage, which seceded from the United States of America, tell them to call me and let me show them this picture, this advertisement from this magazine called the “Thunderbolt.” It was the newspaper of the National States’ Rights party run by Bill’s pen pal friend Ed Fields. On the back, this is in June of 1965, you can see this, an ad where you can order Confederate battle flags. This is 1965 and the ad says, “Fly the Confederate Battle Flag.” The Confederate flag is no longer a sectional emblem. It is now the symbol of the white race and white supremacy. Fly it on on your car and on your house. So folks, this is not new that this has become a symbol of hate, and thank goodness Governor Bentley and others have begun to bring that down.

Despite my instincts as a lawyer, somewhat as of a political junky, to declare that I have the answers for anything, I cannot profess at all to have the absolute remedies for the enormous ills that we see. However, the richest part of those girls who died, the richest part of their gift to me has been an awakening that has connected me to my own personal prejudice, strengths and weaknesses, a very humbling reality check, and now an invigorating journey toward a greater self awareness that might not solve the world’s problems, but hopefully won’t contribute to them.

Indeed, and I told Bill this in our talks, I feel like I have grown more in the last 15 years, than I did in my first 45. Searching for winning solutions to these recurring problems like most everyone else — politicians, street protesters, blog writers, anonymous internet experts, academics — everyone wants to hit a home run or win a national championship. But perhaps it’s more productive to take the long view, exactly the way Coach Sabin and the Tide Football team did recently.

It’s the kind of approach that we took in tackling the four decades-old cold case in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing. I longed for the big hit, the one big thing to put everything in order, to put it to rest, but truth and resolution weren’t going to be established that way. The details had to be linked, the dots had to be connected, and the game contested one play at a time with everyone doing their part until the very end.

Power teams like the Crimson Tide realize that excelling at small ball — solid blocking and tackling, accurate pass routes, sticking with your plan — wins the game, not the fluke or the last second heroics. It’s not as sexy, it’s not necessarily going to produce a fair result every time. But just as we have witnessed, it’s an especially useful strategy when the whole team buys into the concept. You are playing for a winning season, not just for the glory of an occasional spectacular victory.

So in considering this unique moment today, considering our unique moment in history, a time when we cannot ignore our past and perhaps tumble backwards toward the abyss, or truly embrace its lessons and take a step away from the lingering dangers, the choice for me is clear, in my personal life, my hopes for this country, my hopes for my family, my children, my grandchildren … my hopes for this country is to play the small ball, get the little things right. And hopefully others, just like everyone in this room, will also join the team. As a team we can win, as a team we can defeat the prejudice that we know is going to exist regardless of what we do. That’s the goal. And at the end of the day, we are all in this together. We are all in this together, and our state is becoming more diverse, and if we don’t remember the lessons of history, we will be doomed to repeat them.

So thank you for allowing me to be here tonight, thank you for this event, for your celebration, and for your courage and for your look forward to recognizing where we are and where we’re headed. Thank you very much.