Few cities in America have come to symbolize the country’s struggle with civil rights more than Birmingham, Alabama. It was here that Bull Connor arrested the Freedom Riders, where Martin Luther King, jail-bound, wrote his famous antisegregation “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” where the nation watched with a growing sense of unease as sit-ins and mass marches turned into a chaos of tear gas, attack dogs, fire hoses and arrests.
At this year’s New Yorker Festival, Malcolm Gladwell turns his attention to the Civil Rights movement and, in particular, Birmingham 50 years later. As he did in such noteworthy books as The Tipping Point and Blink, Gladwell will use his uncanny intellect to reframe the civil rights story in surprisingly new ways.
FORA.tv is livestreaming Gladwell’s program on Saturday, October 6, at 10 A.M.
