Taylor Branch, Ta-Nehisi Coates, David Simon, and James McBride on a panel to discuss the Baltimore protests, Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s legacy, and bringing “America in the King Years” to HBO. Photograph courtesy Michael R Faulkner

Taylor Branch spent twenty-four years writing “America in the King Years,” and he’s been trying for almost as long to get his civil-rights trilogy adapted for the screen. The project has bounced around film studios and television stations for so long that Alex Haley even worked on a script. “Film is about intimacy,” Branch said on Friday, at a panel during the Maryland Film Festival, “and it’s hard to get people in Hollywood to show the civil-rights movement for what it was, which was people every day in internal conflict with themselves about things that really mattered.”

Branch was speaking in Baltimore’s Station North Arts and Entertainment District, not far from the recent protests over the death of Freddie Gray and ongoing police brutality in the city. The panel, “A Work in Progress: Writing Race,” featured the writers who are, along with Branch, finally bringing his masterwork to the screen, as a miniseries on HBO: the novelist James McBride, the journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates, and the writer David Simon.

The panel was organized hastily when the festival’s director, Jed Dietz, asked Simon for ideas about how to acknowledge the protests. Worried that the unrest might scare off attendees, Simon wanted to participate, but with nothing to screen, he offered a look into the writing room as the collaborators “figure out how to squeeze Taylor’s opus, his trilogy, ‘America in the King Years,’ through the keyhole.”

Simon introduced his team, explaining how they had found their way through the thousands of pages of history in Branch’s books, eventually focussing the miniseries on the third volume, “At Canaan’s Edge,” which covers the period from 1965 to 1968, when King turned the civil-rights movement toward economic equality. After settling on their “uber themes,” Simon described how they chose characters and assigned point-of-view. He said they were “liberated” by the decision to “veer away from the idea of King,” when they “started to look around the edges for the most regular people.”

That was a natural move for McBride, who, on Friday, explained his devotion to working-class voices and how he “sees the civil-rights movement from the prism of my own childhood.” McBride said that he was most looking forward to telling the stories of C. C. Bryant, a barber in Mississippi whose shop became a hub for activism until it was bombed; Fannie Lou Hamer, famous for saying “I am sick and tired of being sick and tired” but less well known for her organization of the Freedom Summer and the Poor People’s Campaign; and Amzie Moore, who housed some of the movement’s greatest leaders while designing its most successful voter-registration drive. Coates said, “I live in mortal terror of writing about Moses,” but that he was eager to write about Kwame Touré (formerly Stokely Carmichael), who took over the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee after John Lewis, and whose life demonstrates the strain of such commitment to peaceful change. While both Branch and Simon worry about how to write King’s advisor and lawyer, Stanley Levison, Branch said that he was most excited to see the marriage of the activists Diane Nash and James Bevel on screen.

For all of the writers, this look at the margins helped them to avoid what Simon called “marble men,” those larger-than-life figures whose stories are already fixed firm in history books and other film projects. But they have also tried to break through the marble, looking for the imperfections that let those historic figures become human. They told the story of when Branch brought Harry Belafonte into the writing room. (“I knew this was a bad idea,” Coates said.) Simon described how they explained to Belafonte what they wanted. “The drama’s going to take care of itself,” they told him. “The stuff we need to get through this are the lighter moments, the comedy.”

Belafonte sat back in his chair, and then, as Branch recalled, “He said, ‘Well gentlemen, I have just seen “The Diary of Anne Frank” three or four times and I don’t recall a single joke. I don’t recall any light moments in “Schindler’s List,” do you? What about “12 Years a Slave”? It just came out. I don’t think there was any humor in there at all. Is that what you’re going for?’ ”

“In all fairness,” McBride confessed, “I was the one who put my foot deep down in my throat and David just—he just commenced to putting his whole leg down his throat. And Harry Belafonte cleaned the floor with us.”

All scripts to six parts of the series have been assigned, but as they work on their individual episodes, the writers said that the protests in Baltimore and around the country are on their minds. McBride remembered one of the first things David Simon had said to him about this project: “The civil-rights movement never stopped, it continues”—only “the faces have changed.”

Simon recounted how a section of Branch’s book had challenged him recently as he debated the unrest in Baltimore. He’d written on his personal blog, “If you can’t seek redress and demand reform without a brick in your hand, you risk losing this moment for all of us in Baltimore. Turn around. Go home. Please.” At the panel, he described his mindset at the time, saying, “I find myself becoming tactical,” worrying that the violence of the riots and the “optics” of the protests were alienating potential allies. But he was troubled by a fight between James Bevel and James Forman that took place at Beulah Baptist Church, in Montgomery. Bevel criticized the younger leaders for their disobedience and urged patience, but the disagreement, emblematic of growing tensions between S.N.C.C. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference over violent resistance, culminated with Forman shouting from the pulpit: “If we can’t sit at the table of democracy, we’ll knock the fucking legs off!” “Oh shit,” Simon thought, “I’m playing the Bevel part online against someone who is arguing Forman.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates said that Baltimore hadn’t changed his perspective, and he challenged Simon to look beyond individual actors, to consider cities like Baltimore as “an ecological system,” where investments in excessive policing and incarceration have been like pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. There are “effects,” he said that go “beyond whether people are good, whether people are nice, whether they’re bad.” “That’s like the point of ‘The Wire,’ right? It’s structural, it doesn’t matter how noble people are,” Coates said, “it’s rigged. It’s rigged from the jump.”

“I would like for people to be nonviolent, that’s my desire, but I’m not surprised when they’re not. You wonder how much CO2 you can pump in,” Coates said. “I am not calling for riots any more than I would call for global warming.”

Coates had described earlier how he’d “come to feel that there is something deeply tragic” about the civil-rights movement. It was difficult to watch some of the anniversary commemorations of the movement because the celebrations were so triumphant, but he joined Simon’s film project because he knew “David was not going to do self-congratulation.” Because America never really reconciled itself to King’s message of nonviolence or economic equality, Coates said he hoped that some feeling of shame and sense of tragedy could be communicated by their adaptation. McBride disagreed, saying that much of his life and work had been dedicated to accepting history and practicing forgiveness, a kind of optimism he hoped to install in the film.

The disagreements among these writers about Baltimore seemed illustrative of their disparate understandings of the civil-rights movement. And their own shifting between despair and optimism made the presence of that past palpable on this Friday evening. Branch said he hopes that, together, they can “do the history good enough” to make their audience see “how deep this goes.”