No southerner had been elected President for more than a century, and it was a bitter article of faith among southern politicians that no southerner … - Robert A. Caro

The time has come for Americans of all races and creeds and political beliefs to understand and to respect one another. So let us put an end to the teaching and the preaching of hate and evil and violence.

He told them a story — “the little baby in the cradle,” as a student would call it. “He would tell us that one day we might say the baby would be a teacher. Maybe the next day we’d say the baby would be a doctor. And one day we might say the baby — any baby — might grow up to be President of the United States.

Emmett Till’s murder” instilled in Anne Moody, a fourteen-year-old black girl from Alabama, “the fear of being killed just because I was black.” It was the senselessness of the murder of the fourteen-year-old boy that she couldn’t get out of her mind, she was to say. “I didn’t know what one had to do or not do as a Negro not to be killed. Probably just being a Negro period was enough, I thought.