Taylor Branch - Blog

Transcript of Taylor Branch

Taylor Branch: I think the record is pretty clear that the Civil Rights Movement transformed the whole country. Not just race relations, although it transformed those, too, in the sense that terror, the routine terror that existed in the United States in an era spotted with lynchings -- and those lynchings with virtually no hope of justice -- is gone. But it extended so far beyond that in ways that we take for granted or deny. As Dr. King said, the Civil Rights Movement liberated the White South. The White South, which was the poorest region of the country when it was segregated, so much of its psychological energy was invested in enforcing segregation that you couldn't even have sports teams in the south, professional sports teams, until the Civil Rights Movement gets rid of segregation. And the next thing you know, you've got the Atlanta Braves and the Miami Dolphins in a region that had never even had professional sports, because you couldn't have business meetings you were so worried about segregation and who might be there. And it introduced two-party competition by creating black voters. But it also, in the course of doing that, created the first two-party competition in a region that was ossified in one-party Democratic politics for a century, and stigmatized to the degree that Southern politicians weren’t eligible for high national office, certainly in the Deep South. When it removed all of that, it made white politicians eligible to become leaders in both national parties, which we now take for granted, but could never have occurred back then. Trent Lott wouldn't have existed without the Civil Rights Movement. The prosperous Sunbelt South wouldn't have existed without the Civil Rights Movement. Women weren't eligible to go to most of the private colleges in the United States, including Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Dartmouth, you know, on and on, until the Civil Rights Movement got people struggling over what equal citizenship ought to mean. We’d had two millennia of Jewish history, and the idea of a female rabbi was foreign, until people in the United States started struggling over what equal souls meant and its relation to equal citizenship in the Civil Rights era. And the next thing you know, you have female rabbis in 1972 inspired by the Civil Rights Movement and the first female clergy. So I think if you're a white male Southerner, you're indebted to Civil Rights. If you're a woman -- it's just amazing the breadth of the liberation that was set forward.