Storytelling--to do it in storytelling. I--one of the reasons I wanted to do it was that I knew this had an enormous impact, somewhat like the Civil War and Reconstruction period a century before. But most of the books I read seemed to me analytical and argumentative, y--reinventing new labels of analysis. And I felt that they didn't have the power to really describe what happened at the personal level, which is where I think we really learn about race across the divisions that we have.

And so I really resolved from some lessons out of my experience that I wanted to try to keep it at a storytelling level and follow the stories wherever they went. I just didn't know that there would be so many of them or that they would be s--from--from such broad context; that I'd be chronicling King's relationship with Rabbi Abraham Heschel or something like--you know, these are things that I didn't--had no way of anticipating. So I just kind of stor--I followed storytelling, but it tumbled me off into more worlds than I'd planned on.〔