Jackie Robinson's Civil Rights correspondence [video 56min]

Michael Long has collected the personal correspondences of Jackie Robinson in First Class Citizenship: The Civil Rights Letters of Jackie Robinson. From Robinson's integration of Major League Baseball to his involvement in the Civil Rights movement and national politics, his letters reflect the political landscape of the 1950s and 1960s. Jackie Robinson's correspondents included many national political figures, such as Richard Nixon, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Barry Goldwater. Long is an associate religious studies professor at Elizabethtown College and the author of several books, including Billy Graham and the Beloved Community: America's Evangelist and the Dream of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Against Us, but for Us: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the State. He talks with Kevin Merida, an associate editor of The Washington Post, where he has covered politics and culture for 15 years. Merida is the co-author with Michael Fletcher of Supreme Discomfort: The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas and is also the editor of Being a Black Man: At the Corner of Progress and Peril, which originated as a series in The Washington Post.