When I was 15, I decided I wanted to be a lawyer. No one thought this was a good idea

By 1962, King had become, by the media's reckoning, the new civil rights leader.

In high school, I discovered myself. I was interested in race relations and the legal profession. I read about Lincoln and that he believed the law to be the most difficult of professions.

King thought he understood the white Southerner, having been born and reared in Georgia and trained a theologian.

I remember being infuriated from the top of my head to the tip of my toes the first time a screen was put around Bob Carter and me on a train leaving Washington in the 1940s.

Living at the YMCA in Harlem dramatically broadened my view of the world.

Something which we think is impossible now is not impossible in another decade.