I have a dream. My four little children one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.

Hello again. I'm Alan Alney. Welcome to another To the Point podcast. What it means to be American. That's the title of a project of Sokolow Public Square and the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. One American with a lot to say about that was Dr. Martin Luther Kang. His birthday, of course, we're celebrating this week. In Los Angeles, I recently talked about him with David Garrow.

He is the author of Bering the Cross, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

His book won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1987 and the seventh annual Robert F. Kennedy Book Award.

Here's our interview.

David, it's great to be with you.

Yes, thank you.

Baring the cross, the title, it seems to me, in many ways, says it all,

because Martin Luther King Jr. really saw his life, certainly at the end of his life, as a kind

of sacrificial drama.

Yes.

Dr. King, right from the early weeks of the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955-56, saw his role,

saw his calling as a personal sacrifice.

He had no egotistical desire to be a quote unquote leader, to be a famous person.

He got drafted by the other black civic activists in Montgomery to be the lead spokesperson for

the bus boycott, primarily because he was brand new in town and wasn't aligned with any

of the existing sort of black civic factions in the city. And all along throughout the late 50s, throughout the course of the 1960s, Dr. King always thinks of

his life and his role in a self-sacrificial way.

And bearing the cross is a phrase that he himself used

on at least four or five occasions that we have from audio tape,

where he is explicitly or implicitly

talking about how he copes with this role that he feels he got dragged into.

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