Martin Luther King Day has a little more heat on it this year than some. From the cauldron of presidential politics has spun the question: who mattered more in the earth-moving civil rights revolution of the 1960’s — Martin Luther King, or Lyndon Baines Johnson?
The preacher or the president? Crazy question, say those who were there. But what an unlikely, high-voltage, interlocking duo this was.
Today we look and listen back on their astounding, high-wire relationship. It still sounds hot.
This hour, On Point: MLK, LBJ, and the civil rights revolution.
-Tom Ashbrook
Guests:
Nick Kotz, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of “Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Laws That Changed America.”
Roger Wilkins, professor of history and American culture at George Mason University, he served as assistant attorney general in the Lyndon B. Johnson administration. He shared the Pulitzer Prize for Watergate coverage in 1972 as a member of the Washington Post editorial page staff.
Tags: American history, civil rights, Lyndon B. Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., politics
