Worlds Colliding

Taylor Branch interviewed on Jon Stewart's upcoming "Rally to Restore Sanity"

Politics, when you're actually trying to do something, is about moderates. Extremists can push things and raise new questions, but what made [King's] march on Washington significant in 1963 was that a proposition to change the power relations of the entire South, which had seemed preposterous and hopeless only a decade before, suddenly was in the range of passage in the Congress, because a bill to do so had been introduced by the president. On the one hand, the country was scared to death, because it was totally unfamiliar with the idea of black people on the main stage of national politics; on the other hand, they were rallying to support a bill that had been introduced by the president -- a bill that did pass the next year. So it's obviously moderate.