 Well, first of all, I would like to express my thanks to the American consulate for having invited me as a moderator to this video conference with Dr. Claiborne Carson. And I'll try to give the audience a general idea of what Dr. Carson has been doing from the 70s on. This is the summary of the summary. A distinguished professor and researcher, Dr. Claiborne Carson has been a member of Stanford's Department of History since receiving his doctorate from UCLA in 1975. He has also served as a visiting professor, a visiting fellow at many higher education institutions, including Duke, Emory, Harvard, the University of California in Berkeley, and they call this attitude on science social in Paris. But what has made him famous is his devoted involvement with Martin Luther King's legacy. Under his direction, the King Papers Project has produced seven volumes of a comprehensive edition of speeches, sermons, correspondence, publications, and unpublished writings. Dr. Carson has also edited many other books based on King's papers, including his autobiography, which I had the privilege of translated into Portuguese. Dr. Carson. Good to be with you. Very pleased. And thank you for the wonderful translation. Thank you. So where do we start? Your conference. Well, I would like to, first of all, just say that I'm very pleased to be talking with someone in Brazil because that has been a major interest of mine since my college days when I trained for the Peace Corps. Unfortunately, I was not able to go to Brazil, but I've maintained that interest. I've written some articles on comparative race relations in the United States and Brazil, and I've only had the privilege of coming there one time, but very much enjoyed it. And I look forward to coming back again. I think that Martin Luther King also is someone who is particularly, I think among all the African-American leaders, with the possible exception of Malcolm X, was the one who had the most global vision. He was concerned. He saw the African-American racial problem as part of a world problem. And I think that he saw this as one of the central questions that had to be resolved throughout the world. So he very much identified with the anti-colonial struggles that were going on at the time. He was very concerned about issues of racial discrimination and also economic injustice that happened throughout the world. And he was always looking for a global solution to those problems. I don't know if you're asking. Yes. Yeah. No, please go on. Please tell us something about your experience and your thoughts about Martin Luther King's legacy. Well, one of the things you didn't mention because it was before my scholarly career is that I was at the March on Washington in 1963 when Martin Luther King gave his great I Have a Dream speech. He was part of the focus of my life. But I think I was much more identified with the young people in a group called the Student on Violent Coordinating Committee. And that was the group that produced people like Stokely Carmichael and Julian Bond and John Lewis, who is now in Congress. Many of the younger activists my age were part of what was then called SNCC, the Student on Violent Coordinating Committee. And they were the ones who challenged King. They were the ones who felt that they weren't following Martin Luther King. Martin Luther King was following them. And that often happens in a movement. I see similarities with the South African movement, where some of the younger people felt that they weren't following Nelson Mandela. He was actually following them. So that split fascinated me. And my first book was called In Struggle, SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s. And in that book, I credited SNCC with being much more the vanguard of the movement in the Deep South. The young people in SNCC were much more willing than Martin Luther King to go into the most dangerous areas of Mississippi to try to register people to vote. They were the ones who took the lead in what was called the Freedom Ride, where they went through the South and faced mobs when they were trying to. They were brutally beaten when they tried to get service at all white bus terminals in the South. They were the ones who took the lead in the sit-in movement, which was the largest of the movements that took place during the 1960s in terms of protest. Thousands of students went to jail during that time. So that was the beginning before that time in 1985 when Coretta Scott King called me and unexpectedly asked me to edit and publish the papers of her late husband. And so I've had the privilege of looking at the movement from the grassroots up. And now, for the last 30 years, seeing King's perspective. And so part of what you see in the autobiography is I'm bringing together how King saw the world. And even in a chapter where I talk about the March on Washington, and I see myself looking through King's eyes out at that audience, and I'm in that audience. And for the first time, really seeing, yes, this is the way King saw the world and trying to convey that to the world. But I still, even now, have some of that other perspective because I understand that King had never lived. There still would have been a strong African American freedom struggle. He influenced that movement, but I would not argue that he was the essential component to that movement. Rosa Parks in Montgomery would not have waited for a phone call from Martin Luther King to make that decision to not give up her seat on the Montgomery bus, and that launched the first major stage of the African American freedom struggle of the 50s and 60s. And so how old were you at that time? Well I was 19 at the March on Washington. So I was still a teenager. And I had grown up in a part of the United States in New Mexico where there were very few black families. So much of what I learned about the black world was through reading accounts in the newspapers about young people my age who were playing crucial roles in this freedom struggle that was gaining steam during the 1950s. So that... Can you give us a sense of the feeling of being part of that struggle? Well the feeling I had was that unfortunately I was thousands of miles away from that struggle because I was in the western part of the United States and most of these activities were taking place in the south. So for me the first time I really got a sense of it and got close to it was in 1963 when I went to the March on Washington. And right before that I met Stokely Carmichael at a student conference. So I was greatly influenced by, very excited by meeting him because he was kind of a role model. He was doing things that I wanted to do. Later on I met Bob Moses who was another important figure in this struggle. And the young people I met they seemed to be doing things that far more exciting than my life. And I wanted to take part in that and so that's what led me to move to Los Angeles because at least there in that urban setting I could find more young black people who felt like I did and wanted to be part of the movement and we began to build an urban Los Angeles equivalent of SNCC. I was called the Nonviolent Action Committee and that was my first activism during the mid-1960s as I was going to school. I guess all of my spare time from going to college I was spending protesting and being an activist during the 1960s. You are not from the south. So how was it for you going to a region of your country where segregation was something by law? Well even though I was living outside the south both of my parents were originally from the south. So I had a sense of what they had come to New Mexico in part to get away from that. So they had migrated away so that their children would not have to go through the same experiences that they went through. And also when we traveled I remember going to my grandfather's funeral and we traveled through parts of the United States where there was segregation. We stopped at a fuel for the car gasoline station and all of us children were not allowed to use the restroom. They sent us to an outhouse behind the station and I had never had that experience before and still to this day I can remember it being humiliating. And I always felt that my father could, you know, he would not permit that. My father was a security inspector at a government laboratory. He carried a weapon most of the time. And so I was surprised that he could not do anything about that. So we had to go through that experience and I realized later that it was very humiliating for him that he understood that if he had tried to do something he might have been killed himself or had his family harmed. So I had experiences like that that brought home to me what these young people in the south were fighting against. And I empathized with them and I wanted to help them in any way I could and that was as important as going to college for me. So those experiences kind of helped shape my scholarship and eventually led me to decide that that's what I wanted to focus my scholarship on the question of how do oppressed people liberate themselves. How does that happen in history? And of course my main example was the movement that I was part of. But I was also from the beginning very concerned about how that compared with other movements throughout the world. And over the years I've come to think of these struggles as all interrelated. That Martin Luther King and many of the people in the group I was in were very influenced by Gandhi and by Kwame Nkrumah and Ghana. And so they were inspired by these movements going on elsewhere. And later on of course our movement inspired people in other parts of the world. As in Brazil? As in Brazil, yes. And so I think that this movement I've come to think of it as history's greatest freedom struggle. Because the way King viewed it is that our movement was related historically to movements that came before it, the anti-slavery movement. That was the first major international liberation movement which brought an end to slavery in pretty much throughout the world. And after that this movement for citizenship rights. And that again was a global movement that at the turn of the 20th century most people throughout the world were not citizens of the nation where they happened to live. By the end of the century that situation had changed. Now they were at least had basic citizenship rights wherever they were in the world. So that was a major change. But King I think was, his vision was always beyond that too. That he was talking about human rights and so was Malcolm X. They felt that citizenship rights were not a secure basis. And I think since that time we've come to understand that the gain of citizenship rights did not necessarily solve all of our problems. The citizenship rights are defined by governments. They're not defined by people who want liberation. So if you decide that part of your freedom is for example to search for a job someplace else and you happen to cross a national border suddenly your citizenship rights are taken away. And you have no rights. Well that's what my parents tried to do when they left the south. But when they went north from the south they were able to gain rights. But now if someone, if a similar person in Mexico wants to come to the United States they lose their rights. So I think King and Malcolm were very visionary and prophetic in terms of their understanding that even with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which desegregated lunch counters and outlawed many forms of discrimination and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 which eliminated racial barriers to voting that even after that we were not going to be free. That the struggle had to go on. And Martin Luther King I think when you see in his life he actually became more determined after the passage of civil rights legislation. So I teach my students that it's limiting to call him a civil rights leader. If he were simply a civil rights leader he would have retired in 1965. Because that was the... You would say he was a human rights leader. Yes, I think he's a human rights leader. I think that was his vision. And that's what he laid out when he received the Nobel Peace Prize. He said that the civil rights movement in the United States is a small part of a worldwide phenomenon. And that worldwide phenomenon is of course concerned about race and racial discrimination and those sorts of things but it's also concerned about poverty. It's also concerned about war and the way in which particularly the way in which war affects people of color throughout the world. Because in our age wars are not fought between European nations. Because I came of age wars have all been fought in areas of the world where most of the people are black or brown or Asian. And these wars might be proxy wars in the sense of European nations providing the weapons and providing a lot of the stimulus for the war. King understood that war was very destructive to precisely those nations that had gained their independence from colonialism. Let us know how was it for you as a person being invited, someone with your background at the time, being invited to work with Martin Luther King's legacy by Coretta King? As I said, I was very surprised at first, but I understood that I had been recommended by John Hope Franklin who was probably the most distinguished of the historians of African-American life. And at first I said maybe someone else should do this because King had never been the focus of my research. And then I thought, why not? Why shouldn't I try to expand my vision to include King? I had always kind of avoided studying King because I felt other people are going to write books about Martin Luther King. Other people are going to write great biographies of him. I wanted to focus on the people who did not get as much attention, the grassroots organizers. Those are the people who were the focus of my activity, but I thought, why not bring everything together? Why not understand the movement both from their perspective and from Martin Luther King's perspective? Because that's a more complete understanding. And so I had to ask myself, what was it that was unique that Martin Luther King supplied to the movement? And I think it was his vision. I think there were better organizers than Martin Luther King. There were people who were perhaps more courageous in terms of going into the most dangerous places in the South. There were people who were perhaps more innovative in terms of the tactics of the movement, but I don't think there was anyone more visionary than Martin Luther King. I think that was his unique contribution that he was able to see the movement in a broader context. He was able to see that it was not simply about civil rights legislation. It was not simply about getting a seat on a bus, but it was about issues that have been with us for hundreds of years, about how do people liberate themselves from the oppressive forces around them. Have we lost a connection? Okay, I didn't know when exactly we lost it, but. We were talking about how unique Dr. Martin Luther King was in spite of the existence of other leadership, which were more courageous or more, but how unique he was. Well, I think he was a very courageous person himself. But I was saying that the unique quality, there were other courageous people in the movement, his unique quality was his vision. His ability to put the African American situation in the context, in a global context, and then also in a historical context. If you look at his great speeches, what he does is he says that we are at this particular moment where we're trying to struggle for these particular goals. But we have to understand these goals in terms of the long term struggle of African Americans for abstract goals such as freedom, justice. All of these sorts of transcendent values that have been around for hundreds of years and that we need to see our connection with previous struggles. Because then we will understand that even though we're at an important point, we're not at the end of the struggle. That the struggle will go on even if we achieve the immediate goals that are in front of us. And that so he saw this in historical terms, he also saw it in global terms. He was always pointing out the connections and interactions between the African American struggle and the anti-colonial struggles that were going on. And I think he saw it finally in terms of how our ideas about freedom have been shaped by what's going on in the world. And for example, taking ideas from the American Revolution, the Thomas Jefferson and all men are created equal and endowed with certain rights among these life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Well, he says that was a wonderful idea. That's a transcendent notion that can be the basis of struggles throughout the world. But the problem is that the United States hasn't lived up to those ideals, has not realized those ideals. And so even here in the United States, we have a lot of work to do to come to... Because Jefferson, for example, did not say all Americans are endowed with rights. He was talking about all of humanity are endowed with these rights. Well, what does that say about the issue of poverty or the issue of educational opportunities? What does that say about the issue of immigration? If all people have the right to pursue happiness, why do we put barriers in the way of some people's pursuit of happiness? So I think that King was very concerned. And I think if he were here today, he would still be concerned about these ideas. You mentioned something about the connections between the African-American struggle and the struggle in Africa, anti-colonial struggle, the movement in Africa. What would you say was the main influence of the movement in Africa in the United States? Well, I think for King, the main influence came from India and Gandhi. I think that that's why he chose to make his first major trip outside the United States to India. And there's a chapter in the autobiography about that trip to India, which I think had a tremendous influence because he had been influenced by Gandhi. But by the time he comes to India, India itself is moving away from Gandhi and ideas. So he begins to understand that he is the main person in the world kind of carrying on that Gandhian tradition in some words, a Gandhian tradition of nonviolent resistance. And he is going to be the influence that helps spread those ideas elsewhere in the world. One of the things that has been a great privilege of mine as editor of Martin Luther King's papers is I was able to go back in 2009 on the 50th anniversary of King's trip and retrace his steps and talk to some of the same people he talked to 50 years earlier. So this helped me understand the strength of that connection. And it wasn't just between the Indian struggle and Martin Luther King, but more broadly many of the younger people had been influenced by other Gandhians, black, what I call African American Gandhians, James Lawson for example influenced many of the young students in SNCC. He had been to India himself and had studied with the Gandhian movement. So that was a major influence. And then I also just last summer went to Zambia. And the Zambian independence movement was itself very influenced by the protest movements that had been going on in the South during the 1950s. And there were some direct interactions between some of the Gandhian leaders I met. Now they're in their 80s and 90s, but they talked about meeting with Martin Luther King, meeting with other people in the African American movement. And the first president of Zambia came to the United States when he was an activist in the anti-colonial movement and met with King and many of the activists in the African American movement. And of course King went to Ghana in 1957 to help celebrate the independence of Ghana. So these connections are multiple and one of the things that has happened in my life as I've traveled more I see on every trip I take I see more and more of these connections that took place people influenced by African Americans influenced by Africans and people in Asia, people in the Caribbean, all of these movements were greatly interrelated. So in the mid-1960s what we see from his autobiography is that Dr. King started to have two fronts opposing him, one like an internal front from the black movement itself, people who did not agree with the Gandhian tactics he adopted. How would you describe that? How would you help us understand it? Well as you know I've also written about Malcolm X and I think that one of the things that happened with Malcolm X is that I see King and Malcolm as on converging courses that Malcolm came out of an organization that was black nationalist but it was also apolitical that under Elijah Muhammad the nation of Islam felt that African Americans should not participate in protests should not participate even to vote that citizenship rights were not important because Allah was going to intervene in history and free black people. Well Malcolm felt that that might happen but he wasn't about to wait for it to happen and especially as he saw African Americans mobilizing in places like Birmingham and in Selma and late in his life he came to Selma and identified this was after he broke with the Elijah Muhammad left the nation of Islam he understood that his role was to provide not an opposition to King but an alternative to King and so he very much identified with the groups that I was working with and that was the grassroots organizers. He in many of his speeches Malcolm X talks about the established black leaders such as King and the grassroots forces that were pushing King and thought that King was too cautious but I think if Malcolm had lived this conflict and tension between these two perspectives could have been kept within the movement because any mass movement is going to have different factions different approaches and sometimes that can be destructive and we saw that in South Africa and saw that to some degree in the late 60s in the United States where activists spend so much time fighting with each other that this is exploited by people on the outside exploited by the police forces and groups like the FBI in the United States which launched a counterintelligence program to exploit these divisions that existed but they didn't have to become deadly and destructive as they did and I think that was in part because Malcolm and King were no longer there to to provide a model for how you can as King put it disagree without being disagreeable. They have constructive arguments about tactics and strategies without getting to the point where it becomes you know I was on the UCLA campus when two groups the Black Panther Party and the US organization their differences got to the point where they had a killing on the campus and two members of the Black Panther Party were killed and so I saw very close up the results of that kind of destructive ideological and leadership conflict. You talked about King and Malcolm X and what about King and Stokely Carmichael or Kwame Turei? Well Stokely Carmichael Kwame Turei as he later became was a was a good friend of mine and from the first time I met him in 1963 until his death we remained in touch we've remained on very friendly terms and he told me himself that his disagreement with Martin Luther King was not disrespect for Martin Luther King that he understood as an organizer in Mississippi that especially the older people there thought of Martin Luther King as the symbol of the movement so Stokely understood that you don't go and try to organize and say you're the opponent of Martin Luther King. In fact he said you go in and say I'm one of Martin Luther King's men even though you know that Martin Luther King hardly ever came to Mississippi but symbolically he accepted the fact that Martin Luther King had a particular role of respect so and on a personal basis the two were very friendly Stokely Carmichael would go over to Martin Luther King's house he would go to his church sometimes he would have have dinner at his house so on a on a personal level and I think this would have been true with Malcolm and King too if they had lived I think they would have understood on a personal level they have to have respect for each other even as they they differ over ideology that's that's a difficult lesson for any movement and and you saw how destructive it could be and for example the South African movement where it often became deadly there too. In the role played by engaged celebrities like Harry Belafonte what's the importance of that? Well I think that that's one of the untold stories of the movement now more books have been written about how entertainers Harry Belafonte, Nina Simone, many others who I could name saw themselves as providing cultural support for the movement and the the idea of freedom songs you know which was always very central to the movement that I think in some ways when the when the movement stopped singing that was a sign that it was beginning to come apart because especially congregational singer singing is something that brings people together it provides it's a surprise it supplies some support for them when they have to go into confrontations people become become braver because they are you know when you when you see the the footage of people marching during the 1960s often that was the way of of bringing everybody together and and I think that when we lost that that was a sign that the movement no longer had that that kind of mass support and had become more of a factional movement and and factions don't don't win long-term struggles you know there there has to be some basis of of unity and and so I think the movement began to come apart and I think we've seen the result of that that you know King's last book is where do we go from here and when he wrote that book he was asking a question that I think applied to the entire movement and still applies to us today where do we go from here we have basic citizenship rights but we're not free we don't have justice we don't have we can see from the events in Ferguson you know the the killings by police that that there's a lot of work that still needs to be done there's more poverty today and in some parts of the United States there's more the gulf between rich and poor has grown wider in in many places so we have a lot of work to do and yet we don't seem to have that unified sense that we're all in it together I think for some african-americans it's it's more of I've got mine I you know I hope you get yours but that's that's your problem not my problem and and and I think that that's that's very destructive I think that we need to to begin to address the problems that King would remind us are still there you know that every time I go to a King holiday celebration I think it's wonderful that all these people come in their nice suits and you know for one day a year celebrate Martin Luther King but I I think the best way of celebrating him would be to carry on his struggle and to and to do the unfinished business you know that do all people have life liberty in the pursuit of happiness well I'm not sure if everyone would agree that we have equal right to life and liberty and the right to pursue happiness and until we get there we need to still recognize that there's there's struggles to carry on so what do you think would be uh if you know it was alive Dr. King's reactions to these uh regrettably frequent incidents were uh unarmed black men especially black boys are shot by frightened police officers something that happens unfortunately very frequently also here in brazil a couple of weeks ago we had 12 kids the same incident 12 black kids were killed by the police in Bahia so uh what uh would be his reaction to this well I think we need to understand that that oppressed people don't invent violence uh it's if it's part of the culture they express it but part of what King meant by non-violence is that it's a message that goes up in the social order as well as down in the social order we often think of non-violence as something that oppressed people should use in their struggle for freedom but we what King was saying is that it applies as well to those at the top of the social order you can't you can't expect uh for example african-americans to be non-violent when you're basically drafting them or during the vietnam war or today providing economic incentives for them to go into the military and go 10 000 miles away and kill someone else you know that's that's a a message that is is contradictory and and I think that we need to to understand that that is a struggle that involves all of the people in this country you know that it's not african-americans who are known to to buy weapons and and and and push the notion that every person should be able to walk around with a with a weapon you know that's white americans who are saying that so we live in a very violent society and I think we have a lot of work to do to try to to not only have non-violent policing but just have a much more non-violent world and uh you know the the weapons that are killing so many people around the world are not we're not made in angola you know they were not made in the countries where they are being used they're made in the united states and europe and the advanced countries in the world and uh but what happens is that these weapons end up in the congo and end up in in in various places end up in the ghettos and that is something that means that it's not going to get solved by simply sending a message to those people who are discontented angry and oppressed to say uh don't express this uh unless you are non-violent it you know they're they're they're not going to accept that message it's going to be they're going to see the hypocrisy of that and and particularly now when we are are giving police military type weapons you know then what message is that being is that sending when um you know we're not that far from a situation in the united states where we could be using drones you know and all of these these weapons of of war inside our cities um we already have seen uses of tanks and anti-personnel weapons uh machine guns and you know other things that that just don't belong in any kind of an urban environment so i think that we have some work to to do and i think that for me i think it was very encouraged to see my young students at stanford being concerned about these issues and and pushing the rest of the society and say look at yourself look in the mirror we you know we we tend to point the finger at people who are suffering and say why are you so violent but unless we really look in the mirror at those of us who don't go and and use weapons why why are these weapons available you know our our young people just growing up more violent than they were 50 years ago i don't think so i think that they have more encouragement from many sources in the culture that says that says that violence is the answer to problems so um there are some uh scholars who are talking about uh at the same time yeah what they call an americanization of brazilian society because now here in brazil we have affirmative action for blacks we have the state recognizing that race is a problem and at the same time we have with the united states uh uh racism becoming more subtle not so explicit as it used to be some uh 50 years ago and with the growing presence this presence of latinos who tend to have the same ideology to share the same ideology as brazilians of racial democracy of uh a hypoc hypocritical view about that so how do you see that approaching of the two countries well i i i think it's not surprising that in the world we we're seeing this convergence of problems that that seem to be american becoming more global or problems that were global becoming more common in america um and i think that's that's the trend that's what globalization means is that that we're all kind of confronted with the same uh mass culture that's that's current throughout the world we are all confronted with the same market economy that affects you uh you you buy the same products that that we buy and so all all of this means that the solutions to to these kinds of problems are not going to be found in in uh particular brazilian solutions although sometimes some nations might be um pushing faster you know for example where you mentioned uh affirmative action being but now we have lots of a trend in the united states away from affirmative action so uh so is that is that the trend i think that my own feeling is that that i'd like to see more attention with the problems of those at the bottom of the social order i think we tend to have almost a trickle down notion of if you solve the problems of the middle class that that will you know you most affirmative action programs are designed for people who are already doing okay they just need more opportunity but often that distracts attention from those people who are really at the bottom of the social order you know you you have the the capability for a few students to get into high quality schools high quality universities and get good jobs but what about those left behind when you when you take the most talented of the young people from one oppressed group and say okay we're going to open up these opportunities for you what happens to those left behind they become even more discouraged because their schools no one cares now i i really uh think that in this country in the united states the brown decision was kind of limited brown versus board of education i think it said it said that you should eliminate barriers for black people to go to previously white schools but it didn't say what was going to happen to the majority of black young people who were left in the predominantly black school and what has happened in the 50 60 years since then is that those schools have the the quality has declined because no one is that concerned about them anymore because now you've taken that minority and allowed them to integrate into the white schools and uh so i think that you know throughout the world the places where i want to go and i want to look at is is not so much the experiments in integration and desegregation but what happens to people who are not integrated into the main society what happens to them what what what programs and what is happening in their community that can give them hope that things are going to get better i think that dire poverty is is a major major problem because if you don't get decent education the chances of ever getting out are very slim and it's not enough again just to pluck a few exceptional people from that group and say we're going to provide opportunities for you to go to these particularly good schools because that's taking away the symbols of hope that and it says to the society just let the public schools you know let the the free education become worse and worse and we're going to provide these new opportunities for the ones that we decide are are going to be successful and so i think that that uh everywhere in the world that i've seen uh we've seen a decline in what i would consider a concern about the entire group as people begin to retreat and say i have to just focus on my own advancement i have to find ways of making my my own family successful and i can't be concerned about other people's families and and i think that that that attitude is is is very prevalent in the world i think it's it's something that you know we we don't tend to see the kinds of of human rights struggles i see some signs that young people have gotten that and are beginning to to struggle about those issues but many of the people my age don't really understand what's happening with uh say the protests that are going on and in Ferguson they just see it as you know what what are these people protesting against why why can't they just be more civil and and what they're what they're protesting against is is the that sense that we're leaving some people behind that um that we need to pay more attentions to what is going on in the poorest communities of the in the poorest schools and and i think if martin Luther King were here he would be encouraging that kind of a movement i think that's what he was doing in Memphis at the time of his death he you know he's he he wasn't there helping a union of government workers he was he was there helping a union of sanitation workers those at the bottom of the economic order and he was saying that that those are the people that he was devoting his life to at the time of his death and so i think we need to to understand that that kind of attitude as we as we move into the 21st century where you know quite frankly i i think that if we don't deal with those kinds of issues it's going to have a very destructive effect on the entire society because if people are oppressed you have a choice you can either suppress them with kind of repressive measures or you can offer them hope for a better solution but they're not gonna in and today's world are just not going to to stay content with being at the bottom so um so i i think the king's message is still very relevant for today's world so now we have the questions from the audience the first question talks about an episode of the 18th century in philadelphia when black members of the st george methodist church walked out in protest after black parishioner absalom jones was ordered to get up and move from the front of the back of the gallery the question is do you think in some way the creation of the first african methodist episcopal church uh african methodist episcopal church ame inspired by absalom's attitude as well as the work by richard alem inspired by monolithic engineer 100 years later frederick doglas was also a prominent figure denouncing hypocrisy massachusetts and rochester new york do you think that jones and doglas can be considered the mlks of their own centuries yes i i think so i think that um that question kind of brings up my major point and and i think what king's vision was all about it was a vision that was historical that understood that that these movements are related to each other we we tend to i think mistakenly view movements in isolation both geographical isolation and historical isolation so we we tend to think of of the anti-slavery movement as we get rid of slavery we're free end of story everyone could go off and um and and enjoy their freedom well a leader like a frederick doglas understands that that's not true that you may be free of slavery but there are still enormous problems in terms of that you have to confront in order to have your uh group really advance as a group that some individuals will be able to advance but as a group you'll still remain behind because you've been held back so we always like the the uh the idea of the two runners right behind yeah and uh and so i think that that's the danger of using a term like civil rights movement i prefer a term like freedom struggle because civil rights movement doesn't explain what king was doing in memphis that was not a civil rights issue that was that was a struggle for basic human rights the right to organize the right to to have a decent life um so black or white black or white yes and the king's poor people's campaign was not a civil rights movement so i think that when we use that term we we tend to be either concerned about getting civil rights legislation or defending civil rights legislation and what we need to do is is look at that the distinction between civil rights and human rights human rights are much more general and we haven't paid very much attention to them and in the last 50 years because we made civil rights gains so now when we when we look at something like voting rights we tend to say well isn't isn't this protected under the voting rights act of 1965 and my attitude is that's the wrong question as a human right you have a right to participate in determining your own destiny it's not a right that can be specified by whether you registered on time or whether you have the right id or you know all of these other issues you have a basic human right to participate in any kind of decision making that affects your own destiny that was clear in the american revolution when they talked about no taxation without representation but we we tend to get we narrow our focus when we talk about civil rights we broaden our focus when we talk about human rights the second question uh the question comes from george da silva a student at the state university of Rio de janeiro uh what has changed from the days when black militants were murdered dr king dr king was murdered to the current days when we have the presence of an american president in the united states well i i think that it's it's wonderful that we have made enough progress um president obama obama would not be president without the voting rights act of 1965 but also without the immigration act of 1965 that both of those provided the conditions that made possible the election of an african-american president but again that the focus should not be on that individual achievement i think the focus should be on are we by paying attention to that individual achievement looking away or ignoring deep-seated problems that are still with us particularly the issue of poverty um you know having obama as president doesn't help the poor person and in fact it might make that poor person even more discouraged because they understand the gulf between the opportunities available to brock obama who was able to go to a uh splendid uh high school he was able to go to one of the elite colleges in this country he had a number of advantages in order to prepare himself for the role that he has now so um and those advantages are not available even even to young people who want to go to college when i went to college i could work my way through college because in california going to the university of california was relatively inexpensive i think the mine uh fees per year were 200 dollars now it would be perhaps 50 times that much uh to go to uh to go to college uh at a state university at a public university so we are taking away those ladders of opportunity and so i think that that obama being president is great symbolically i think that it shows that that the nation that would not have been conceivable in the nation that i grew up in but i think that we also need to understand that it doesn't change the basic situation for most black americans another question the next question comes from commander debora medeiros from the brazilian navy my wife in your opinion uh what was the impact of the civil rights movement and the leadership of dr king on the afro-descendant women's right movement what was the impact of this fight on the relationship among black men and women oh i think it had a tremendous impact the fact that that the civil rights act of 1964 outlawed discrimination based on sex as well as race spurred the women's rights movement the year after that the national organization for women was formed in 1965 and the women's rights movement gained a stimulus i would argue that far more white women benefited from the civil rights act of 1964 than black americans because they're far more white women um that opportunities opened up and and that's true also for other minorities and other disadvantaged people um i think once once the the change came about that said that it is no longer legitimate to discriminate on the basis of race then every other group that face similar kinds of discrimination could could make the argument well just as black americans shouldn't be discriminated we shouldn't be discriminated against either um so it became a model yes for the disability rights movement for the gay rights movement for for just about every movement of the past 50 60 years has modeled itself on on the african-american struggle and that success and that and and that influence has been around the world it's in most countries in the world now it is no longer at least legally legitimate to discriminate on the basis of of sex or color or disability or and and we're seeing that change applying to sexual orientation also that's more gradual but but it that influence has been there another one from catholic university of Rio de Janeiro professor angela paiva dr clay i had the privilege of conducting research in your institution under your orientation in 1907 my question is whether you are pessimistic about race relations nowadays in what regards to police violence what would dr king say about this issue well first of all i'd like to uh uh say send my greetings to angela who i i do have very fond memories of her and um actually getting together with her when i came to brazil some years ago uh so um so i'm glad to to respond to that um i think that when we when we look at at the current issue of police violence i think that we have to understand that this is something that is specific to to countries where violence for other reasons has become endemic in the culture and and we can talk about you know i you know i i guess you would be able to talk more about brazil because i think brazil and united states and in some ways are the the violence that is going on in ghettos reflects a larger violence that is going on in the society and um you know that these there are more people killed in even a small city in the united states by police and more police killed than in entire countries like in great britain or germany or you know that these things are very rare and these countries also have uh racial minorities they also have poverty so that that's not the cause it it's one factor but we have to begin to look at what about the broader society what about the broader culture which is that is encouraging this kind of violence and why are we trying to uh to deal with social problems through violence i think king would caution us that um violence is never a good answer to violence it just generates the conditions for more violence and and and i think also in both certainly in the united states we tend to call anything we don't like a war against so um we're the war against drugs i think have has sown a great deal of violence in in in our society that uh that we we need to understand that sometimes the solution is worse than the problem if the if the solution is a war and we mean physically eliminating the source of the problem rather than dealing with its deeper cause then we're going to create a situation where the violence simply escalates and and that is that has been the case over the certainly since the 1980s um you know one of one of the things that we've seen is the way in which the militarization of the police the um when when i was growing up there was no such thing as a swats squad you know there's this notion of having highly militarized police who would invade apartments with with heavy weapons and and uh and you know resulting loss loss of life well what's going to be the result of that over time is that you have a much more armed um population promoting drugs and you have much more violence associated with drugs and for many of these drugs it's it's basically much more of a medical problem and a social problem than a criminal problem um instead of being treated as the internal enemies yes right and i and i think that it's just been misguided and it doesn't you know it's it's um i'm i'm thinking of that that idea that if you if if you try an idea and it fails repeatedly trying it one more time is is simply stupidity and we need to change the strategy of how we deal with with the problem of of violence right now over the last 20 some years the amount of violence in urban areas has actually been going down but police clashes with with with uh residents keeps going up so something is wrong here and we we need to to get at the heart of of that problem and and understand that that violent policing is is great say a broader social problem that cannot be ever solved by more violent policing uh the next question comes from the president of national commission for the promotion of equality of the brazilian bar association mr umberto adami on november 2014 at the zumbi palmaris universities in san paulo graça machel mentioned that the zumbi dos palmaris was a hero for humanity and a teacher for luther king mandela and abdias nascimento do you agree with this statement yes i i think i think so i think that uh there were lots of influences certainly for martin luther king and the african-american struggle um i i think that with respect to specifically those two individuals i i think that there there were others i would also believe that might have had more influence simply because uh they were uh their ideas were more uh disseminated without within the united states uh but um but i i know for myself that uh that learning about um the african african struggles in and africa were were central you know that that these were these were role models these were people who i admired um i i think that that um well i i you know i one of the goals of of my my last years as i get older as as a scholar is uh to try to write more about these connections because i think that that it's very helpful for us to understand that our freedom struggle is not isolated from all the other freedom struggles in the world um i think that that's a very helpful idea as uh sometimes i put it it's like sometimes when i look at uh uh the race of the issue of race in the united states is the as if i was looking at something in brazil with magnifying lenses because it's the same thing at a different level yes and and and uh and we certainly have learned a lot tactically about how to address some of these issues uh i think the problem is that that um particularly for americans we we tend to be very inwardly focused um that we don't study the world we don't travel as much as we might we don't read as much as we might about other nations and other cultures i think that that is changing again with the young people i think i think that particularly uh college educated young people today had know a lot more about the world than i ever knew at that age so that's that's an encouraging sign and i think that that is it has been accelerated by the internet and uh and the the the capability of traveling more um many colleges encourage uh junior year abroad where they you know students can go and and and um learn in another culture and i think that that's that's very hopeful uh there is another question which is actually an invitation uh by the organizers of the literary festival on afghan diaspora uh to for you to attend the next edition of the festival on november 2015 in the last years as in last year's edition you are the most commented and requested specialist by the participants ah well you know i i as i said i i would welcome my next trip to uh to brazil actually i think on my calendar sometime in november i'll probably be in in paris but maybe there might be a time uh either before or after that uh when when i can come to brazil so so uh i i assume that uh anyone who is watching i'm i'm connected on social media i i have a twitter account i have a facebook page so so i encourage yeah i'm very accessible it's easy to reach me uh my email address is ccarson at stanford.edu okay uh this question it comes from van der laban fin from the state council for black citizens rights of Rio de Janeiro dr clayburn uh how do you see the killing the genocide of young afro descendants in the u.s brazil and africa i see that as a major major problem in the world um uh the the phrase black lives matter is uh is to me very similar to the phrase that was used by the sanitation workers i am a man you know you want to be you want your humanity to be recognized by the rest of of the world by particularly those higher in the social order than than you are and if you don't get that recognition that respect that that sense of dignity uh it is a it is a dangerous situation um i i think i hope that what has happened um in with the protests after the killing of michael brown in furgus in missouri that um that this is a wake-up call but sometimes because the media moves from one issue to the next sometimes a wake-up call after we wake up we go back to sleep and uh i i hope that that does not happen i i know that uh my students at stanford seem to be seriously concerned about these issues um and that concern was brought forth in response to the furgus and many of the students i had went there to try to find out more and they staged some protests here around stanford i i think 68 of them were arrested during one of the protests uh so so i i hope that that's not just a a um one-time kind of you know sometimes activism burns out really fast i hope that there's a deeper commitment uh to staying with uh gains are not made overnight i often tell the story of w e b de bois who lived for 90 96 years and he but he was born after the end of slavery so he never sought witnessed the end of slavery and he died right on the eve of the march on washington so he never witnessed the the great victories of the mid 1960s but yet he lived a very full life i don't think he he because he was not there to witness the culmination of his his life struggle he was still what i would call a long-distance runner and i've come to admire those people who who stay with the struggle even as they go through the stages of life even as they raise families and get jobs and and do all the other things that you have to do to survive and in the world you keep your eyes on the prize you keep your eyes on on a vision of a better society and and uh you know these are the people throughout the world who i think are the hope of the world so so i i um you know i think that we've got to get back to the notion that sometimes i hear this phrase back in the civil rights days as if that was then now we're in this post-racial post-political age where you can just go about your own business well if you really believe that i think you're in for a rude awakening because uh eventually these things begin to affect us uh that we are as king often put it an interdependent world uh injustice in one place is reflected in every other place uh that we we were not an island that we are connected to the rest of the world and um and that's imposes an obligation on ourselves to find out more about the global situation and to begin to address these problems as a famous sociologist there are no uh local solutions for global problems well we we we often address our problems locally because then we can see them in front of us but it's and that is that is always the difficulty it's always we want to we want to see this small gain that we can perhaps achieve next this year next year the year after that and we have to be concerned about those because those are those are around us every day but unless we also keep our eyes on what is what is the the long term goal what kind of a society would we like to see in 50 years or 100 years and especially if you're young and you can have that imagination and just say you know that maybe we could achieve a world without poverty you know maybe we could uh bring about a world where everyone has the right to a basic education that gives them the opportunity to move ahead you know all all of these things are are maybe visionary today just like eliminating racial discrimination was visionary and what eliminating slavery was visionary you know that back 200 300 years ago if someone had said we're going to eliminate slavery every place in the world people would have thought they were somewhat crazy because slavery existed in every civilized society and it had existed since history began it was in the bible so how did we do that well someone had to have the vision to imagine a world without slavery and a world without racial discrimination so so we still have that that need to have that vision king like vision that's going to guide us through our individual struggles because part of the reason is that people are not willing to devote their life to get a better seat on a bus you know to go back to the montgomery example that's what king was trying to tell the people in montgomery is that you're you're not walking to work every day for 381 days in order to get a better seat on a bus because at at some point along those 381 days you'll say i'm tired of walking it's raining outside that seat at the back of the bus looks pretty good to me now but if you understand that that's just a part of small part of the longer vision then you can walk those 381 days then then you can understand what keeps people motivated in the struggle the next question comes from the ministry of education in brazilia the capital city how did madela the king combine ideas of religion human rights and negative in his approach can we apply this to combat racism today i think i think so i think that what he was able to do was take christianity and he saw himself as a social gospel minister and the social gospel in his view was this idea that came from the prophets um they were critics in their own day they were were those who were saying that that those in authority are not living up to the ideals that god is set forth and they were not popular uh king saw himself as as a prophet he he understood that his his task was to speak to those in power and say you're not living up to the sermon on the mount you're not living up to the idea of doing justice to those less fortunate and and that that i think if you go back to the to the old testament prophets i mean that that's an idea that that runs through the entire bible there's lots of changes as you know as you read through the bible from the old testament to the new testament and you have a lot of ideas that are much more about the law you know the laws governing uh hebrew society but one of the themes that is all the way through is that theme that it is the duty of any christian to do justice to those who are less fortunate to act in a just way to try to make the society more just and and that's an obligation it's not it's not something that is extraneous to the christian message so he and he understood that that was based around the notion that that we act toward others on the basis of equality because god sees them as equal and because we have equal souls we should have equal rights and this is something that i think gets submerged in a lot of of discussions about christianity particularly in the united states where christianity has tended to be much more about a gospel of prosperity it kind of says reinforces the idea that i'm more fortunate i'm more privileged i'm more wealthy than other people because i deserve it that somehow i am i am more christian than them those people more deserving so so i think that that king i think would advise us to go back to the to the roots of of our faith and and unfortunately i i think that if king were invited to many churches in in the united states and he gave a sermon they would wonder who is that guy why is he saying these radical things but and not really recognize it as you know a a christian message dr carsten what would be your final words to your brazilian audience today well obviously even in a discussion this extended we can only touch the surface of the many concerns we have what i would say is that i am very open to the idea that that my work should be as global as possible i i look forward to the day when when every person you know i i live in silicon valley so i i look forward to the idea that every person would be able to use this technology that was developed here in silicon valley to spread the idea that the world's problems have nonviolent solutions if we just use them and and i think that my goal before before i pass on this role of being editor of king's papers is to is to make sure that before i die you know that that every person in the world will be able to bring up king's message on their on their cell phone on their ipad on their you know wherever they are they would be able to get access to to this information and not just the information about king as a person but about what i call this greatest liberation struggle this effort on the part of people throughout the world to gain basic human rights i think that that message needs to you know we need to we need to combine a great message with a great communications medium a lot of what happens on the internet i would say is not very positive we need to make sure that we have a message worthy of that kind of powerful medium and uh and that's that's my goal and and i'm sure that uh there are many people in in brazil who could you could provide a lot of help in terms of doing that uh one of the things i'd like to see is king's message in every language every major language in the world um we've we've done that to some degree on our website which i invite everyone to to visit we've got king's i have a dream speech in different different languages the translation what that you did is is a step toward that i i think that if people understand that king is not just an african-american civil rights leader i i put him in the same category as as gandhi and nelson-mandela these are these are people who transcend their own movements and have become global figures and um so so i i hope that uh before too long i will be visiting you and and we'll have a chance to have a face-to-face discussion and and many of the people who are are watching this i look forward to to meeting them and it goes in reverse whenever they are on the stanford campus you know like angela they can come in and and visit the king institute here at stanford and i look forward to seeing them here thank you very much thank you