Taylor Branch
Class of 1968
Interview with Chancellor Holden Thorp
March 2010
Author of “America in the King Years”
For my whole childhood, this extraordinary movement was growing up around me…
Taylor Branch
I loved the history department at Carolina. That’s where I gravitated.
I came as a pre-Med student, believe it or not. So started off in pre-Med, wound up in history, just consumed by the politics of that era.
I was here in school, started in 1964—at the height of the year of the Civil Rights Act of 1964—and left in 1968, the year Dr. King was killed.
So these were formative experiences in my life.
For my whole childhood, this extraordinary movement was growing up around me, to the point that it changed my life’s interests against my will.
By the time I got to Carolina, that’s what I wanted to study.
