Dynamite exploded on Sunday morning. Killed four little girls, injured 20 other Negroes.
It was one of more than 40 bombings in that Birmingham area.
Kids were murdered in Birmingham and nobody cared.
Alabama's got me so upset. Tennessee made me lose my rest.
Everybody knows about Mississippi. God, I'm, and you see it.
I know you can feel it. It's all in the air.
Mississippi goddamn got my attention. What she was doing was different.
She got so angry that her voice broke and from Mississippi goddamn on,
it never, ever returned to its former octave.
It was very exhilarating to be part of that movement at the time because I was needed.
I could sing to help my people, not classical music, not even popular music, but civil rights music.
I felt the need for me to somehow or another use humanity to get people to become aware of how people suffered.
That was what drove me into it. It was always the need possibly to be friends
with an impoverished family or to help a poor boy, a poor girl,
to expose something to the public that I felt was being hit.
I just remember my mother and father saying,
here's a black photographer working for Life Magazine.
That was really a source of pride because we really, in terms of media, had been invisible.
We also knew that we had to challenge the old tactics and strategies of the civil rights movement.
It was just too slow for the younger generation.
We wanted our freedom and we wanted it then.
And we said that we needed a major event and who is the better person to carry the message we are trying to carry in,
but a soul singer like James Brown.
At Tougaloo College, just eight miles outside of Jackson, Mississippi,
the program is just started and on the stage right now, James Brown.
Dr. King and all the other civil rights leaders were working out the program for the next day.
And Dr. King said, I can sit around here and have this argument if you want to.
I'm going to see James Brown.
It was just euphoria all over the place that James Brown is here with us, you know.
And he said, hey, you are. You marched all the way through and you have fought back and gave a courageous fight.
It seems that my performance has led into another thing and I do less performing,
but I do more preaching for right and dignity.
I don't want to divide the white and the black because it shouldn't be white and black. It should be people.
Probably the most important show of James Brown's career is April 1968.
Martin Luther King had just been assassinated and all of America is erupting in violence.
The mayor really didn't want James to come there and do that show,
but that city councilman told him up front, if you don't let him do that show,
they're going to try to burn this city down and he was serious.
They were poised to do just that.
For today, for this hour, for Dr. Martin Luther King.
He was dreaming of the day. Peace would come to earth to stay.
