If you missed attending or watching the January 25 event at the New America Foundation to discuss the January/February issue of the Washington Monthly on “Race, History and Obama’s Second Term,” here is a nugget that should whet your appetite. Pulitzer Prize winning author (and MLK biographer) Taylor Branch talks about how some of today’s conservative rhetoric is deeply rooted in the resistance to the civil rights movement, making discussion of race essential if we are to understand our differences.

YouTube video

The full event video is available here. And here you can read the fascinating interview with Branch conducted by Haley Sweetland Edwards about Martin Luther King’s failed effort to convince John F. Kennedy to issue a Second Emancipation Proclamation–and the consequences.

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Ed Kilgore is a political columnist for New York and managing editor at the Democratic Strategist website. He was a contributing writer at the Washington Monthly from January 2012 until November 2015, and was the principal contributor to the Political Animal blog.