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  • 2 days ago
The untold story about how Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and a team of civil rights activists took to basketball courts to connect with young voters, and how their strategy echoed in politics through President Obama's historic campaign.
Transcript
00:00People tend to think of Martin Luther King saying,
00:04I have a brain.
00:05But he was a young man.
00:06And he really played a decent game of basketball.
00:11In the Civil Rights Movement, nobody
00:13knew about what was going on in the South.
00:16And we had to do something about it.
00:19The only thing we could do was go where the kids were.
00:22They were on the basketball court.
00:25To know that Martin Luther King could have played their game
00:28makes them listen, and then you could
00:30talk to them about trying to stop violence in the streets.
00:34Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., he gave us the playbook.
00:38The first time I played basketball with Barack Obama,
00:40he says to me, we want to win, but we want their support, too.
00:43We played every election day for a year.
00:47Martin Luther King, Barack Obama.
00:49Their destiny is connected to each other with basketball.
00:54Basketball, it lends itself to all these unifying elements
00:58than make it a perfect fixture for a movement.
01:02Martin Luther King could redeem the soul of this nation.
01:07He'd say, what is it you're willing to give your life for?
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