SCARBOROUGH: “Yeah. And — and — and — I we — we have to go to break. And it’s — Alex, I apologize. I do. I just have very quickly, Jon, if you can just very quickly for us, I know you can’t, that’s like asked me to quickly ask the question, but if you can very quickly on Martin Luther King Day, can you — can you talk once again, about the extraordinary historic dominoes that fell in 1963 with a March on Washington, 1964 with the Civil Rights Act, 1965 with the Voting Rights Act, and talk about how that was the first time that America really got to a point where the promises of — of the Declaration of Independence, the promises of the Constitution of the United States, the promises of the Emancipation Proclamation, and yes, the 14th Amendment, those promises, actually took legislative form.”
MEACHAM: “Sure, and it absolutely connects — yeah, and it absolutely connects to what we’re talking about. You know, there’s a big debate where we found it in 1619, where we founded in 1776, I would argue that the America in which we live was founded in 1965, as the culmination legislatively of the forces, you’re talking about. The Civil Rights Act of ‘64, the Voting Rights Act of ‘65, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, in many ways, created the country we live in. The first truly integrated electorate in the United States of America was in 1968, in a presidential election, right? It’s sort of breathtaking in a way when you — when you sit back and think about it, Taylor Branch, the great biographer of King, is the first person I ever saw who referred to King rightly, I believe, as a second Founding Father, as a modern Founding Father of a country. And he grounded — King grounded his claims for the country not on something radical and un-American, but on something radical and very American, which was to actually realize the meaning of the words that folks who look like you and me, decided to make — put at the center of the American experiment, that all were created equal. And the claim was, live up to what you say. And that’s King’s continuing legacy.”
SCARBOROUGH: “Yeah.”
MEACHAM: “He was a much more radical figure toward the end of his life. But we live in a better country, because that man gave his life for the rest of us.”