King Remembered

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Today alben para sabermás.

We misremember Dr.

Martin Luther King Jr.

We think of him as universally beloved rather than embattled, beset by criticism from all directions.

We mistake his calls for nonviolence as calls for peace rather than disruptive, enraged civil disobedience.

And we imagine his assassination 50 years ago as a tragedy that struck King down at the culmination of his work rather than at the beginning.

Time to set the record straight.

This is Radio Atlantic.

I'm Matt Thompson, the Atlinics executive editor.

In a moment, a discussion of King's life and legacy.

But first, a true story from the Atlantic staff writer Van Newkirk.

Do they know about Martin Luther King?

We have left it up the only input that can be handled here.

Could you lower those signs, please?

I have some very sad news for all of you,

and that is that Martin Luther King King was shot and was killed tonight on Memphis Tempest.

On April 4th, 1968 on the balcony of the Lorain Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, the Reverend Dr.

Martin Luther King Jr.

was shot and killed.

The assassination was a seismic event.

Its impact felt from the poorest slums to Wall Street.

It led to uprisings and riots in over 100 American cities, the most widespread and costly urban violence in American history since the Civil War.

He deserved what he got.

But when they got rid of Brother Martin Luther King, they had absolutely no reason to do so.

He was the one man in our race who was trying to teach teach our people to have love compassion and mercy for what white people had done when white america killed dr king last night she declared war on us

king's death led to an end of the sanitation workers strike that brought him to memphis it eventually derailed his grand poor people's campaign doomed to a dreary end in resurrection city on the lawn of the nation's capital but most importantly his death marks the unofficial end of what we know to to be the civil rights movement, snuffing out the candle in the dark that many in both black and white America believe to be the last hope for racial reconciliation.

So ended King the Man, so began King the myth.

The deification of Martin Luther King Jr.

began before his body was laid to rest in Atlanta, Georgia.

A country that had turned against him in his last years, with disapproval ratings much higher than his approval, suddenly embraced him as a founding father to the modern age.

In Memoriam, Congress and President Lyndon B.

Johnson scrambled to pass the Fair Housing Act.

His ratings shot back up.

His words became canonical pieces of Americana.

And within 15 years, he'd become so much of a national icon that Ronald Reagan signed off on the bill creating his national holiday.

As governor of California, Reagan said on the day of King's funeral, quote, a great tragedy that began when we began compromising with law and order and people started choosing which laws laws they'd break.

End quote.

In effect, he blamed King's own campaign of civil disobedience for his assassination.

But here Reagan is in 1983 dedicating a national holiday to King's memory.

The White House staged an impressive ceremony today, the president and Dr.

King's widow walking into the Rose Garden together in an effort to spruce up Mr.

Reagan's tattered civil rights image.

The president signed the bill, which he had so strongly opposed, making Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a national holiday.

And he delivered remarks before some 200 invited guests, which, while not quite calling Dr.

King a great American, were designed to honor him.

In 1968, Martin Luther King was gunned down by a brutal assassin.

His life cut short at the age of 39.

But those 39 short years had changed America forever.

The conscience of America had been touched.

Across the land, people had begun to treat each other not as blacks and whites, but as fellow Americans.

And in his words, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.

As the president left, the audience broke into We Shall Overcome, singing the anthem of the civil rights movement as Mr.

Reagan shook hands on his way out.

We shall overcome.

This mythologizing comes with a price.

We're all familiar with the myth of King, but who actually died that day?

Martin Luther King Jr.

in the spring of 1968 was drawing criticism on a number of fronts.

The silent majority of Americans thought that his anti-war activism, along with his links to communists and socialists, made him a subversive.

On the other hand, he's considered part of the counterculture, to which there's already a counter-revolution, the Nixon coalition, the early Southern strategy.

The New York Times ran a front-page editorial titled Dr.

King's Error, in which they said, quote, the strategy of uniting a peace movement and civil rights could very well be disastrous for both causes.

That criticism was echoed by both the NAACP and some members of the black press.

By the late 1960s, even white liberals and moderates had soured on King.

It's best summed up in the 1966 Harris survey, where 50% of whites said King was hurting the Negro cause.

He was moving too fast.

His venturing beyond fighting against Jim Crow, for voting rights, for integration, had taken him into un-American territory.

His economic package that he came up with in 1965, his increasing advocacy against the Vietnam War, his push for fair housing policies, these things upset lots of suburban whites.

King had also fallen out of favor with large amounts of both black moderates and black radicals by 1968.

The black civil rights establishment, including the NAACP, and members of its own organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Coalition, feared that his economic package and his anti-war activism would make it impossible to get meaningful civil rights legislation passed.

But he had to take a more radical policy stance in order to keep up with younger black power leaders.

Black student leaders felt King was out of touch and too focused on respectability.

He thought it was important to always control the optics of protest to present black people in the most favorable light.

People like Stokely Carmichael heavily criticized him and his movement as relics.

And the constant threat of riots in the inner city meant that King had to modify his message in order to deal with black rage.

The reality was, King was at the nadir of his popularity at the end of his life.

His organization faced financial struggles.

Some of his closest friends distanced themselves from him.

He had lost the ear of the president.

He faced active disruption from the FBI.

And he faced serious mental health challenges.

And then came April 4th.

Good evening.

Dr.

Martin Luther King, the apostle of nonviolence in the civil rights movement, has been shot to death in Memphis, Tennessee.

Police have issued an all-points bulletin for the United States.

Within hours, riots began breaking out in the nation's ghettos.

Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Chicago, Louisville, Cincinnati.

In the immediate aftermath of King's assassination, President Johnson rushed back to the Hill, intending to pass another Civil Rights Act that had been defeated in the Senate before.

This one included a collection of housing reforms that King had fought for during a Chicago campaign in 1966.

This time, that act passed, and on April 11th became the Fair Housing Act.

The rest of that year saw the enactment of a few of King's legislative priorities in state houses and some cities.

But the passage of the Fair Housing Act was the end of King's ambitious agenda for federal American law.

No comprehensive civil rights legislation would pass Congress again until 1991.

What really arose from King's death were two things.

The white backlash that had been rising against King was institutionalized, and a sanitized version of King was created that would appeal to every American and every ideology.

First, the white backlash.

Borrowing from the surprise appeal of the Alabama segregationist George Wallace, Richard Nixon's strategist saw an opportunity.

Without directly appealing to voters on white supremacy, Nixon did capitalize on white resentment and states' rights.

Our states and cities find themselves sinking in a federal quagmire as caseloads increase, as costs escalate, and as the welfare system stagnates enterprise and perpetuates dependency.

By that November, white resentment had reached a boiling point.

Violence at the Democratic National Convention exploded onto Chicago's streets and the nation's televisions.

Delegates from King's Disintegrating Poor People's Campaign drove a mule train to Chicago and witnessed those days of rioting.

King knew he had to preach nonviolence because he understood that he was just barely containing an eruption.

Now that he was dead, the country erupted.

It is time for an honest look at the problem of order in the United States.

Dissent is a necessary ingredient of change, but in a system of government that provides for peaceful change, there is no cause that justifies resort to violence.

Let us recognize that the first civil right of every American is to be free from domestic violence.

So I pledge to you, we shall have order in the United States.

We know how the subsequent years unfolded.

Watergate in Vietnam took center stage in national politics.

Black activists and entertainers, including Stevie Wonder, fought for 15 years to have King's birthday recognized as a holiday.

President Reagan signed into law a bill today creating a national holiday honoring Martin Luther King.

Since that dedication, King has been remembered as a victor.

His I Have a Dream speech is remembered as a crowning achievement in American history.

Children learn versions of his rhetoric to remind them of the importance of non-violence.

We are taught that the vision of his children playing with white children has been realized.

But what we miss are all the things he wanted to accomplish but didn't.

King's policy agenda was ambitious and expansive.

But we must see that the struggle today

is much more difficult.

It's more difficult today because we are

struggling now for genuine equality.

And it's much easier to integrate a lunch counter

than it is to guarantee a livable income and a good solid job.

It's much easier to guarantee the right to vote.

than it is to guarantee the right to live in sanitary, decent housing conditions.

It is much easier to integrate a public park

than it is to make genuine, quality, integrated education a reality.

And so today, we are struggling for something which says we demand genuine equality.

He not only wanted school desegregation, but wanted education reforms that put students of all races and classes on equal footing.

He wanted universal health care, a universal job guarantee, and guaranteed housing.

He wanted a truly affirmative democracy.

He wanted to eradicate poverty and capitalism, erase sustained racism, and create a non-violent, peaceful state.

I think America must see that riots do not develop out of thin air.

Certain conditions continue to exist in our society.

which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots.

But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard.

What is it that America has failed to hear?

It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years.

It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met.

And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo

than about justice, equality, and humanity.

It's worth considering what today's world might be if King had lived and accomplished his goals.

Schools might not be resegregating.

Income inequality might not be increasing.

America might not be in the middle of decades of constant war in the Middle East.

America might not incarcerate more of its people than any other nation.

Racial disparities in housing and health might be eradicated.

When people remember King now, they remember the sanitized version of 1980s Platitudes, the man created in President Reagan's dedication, a non-violent crusader who finishes work with his death.

Dr.

King said the evening before his assassination, I just want to do God's will, and he's allowed me to go to the mountain, and I've looked over, and I've seen the promised land.

So I'm happy tonight.

I'm not worried about anything.

I'm not fearing any man.

These are the words of a man at peace with God and himself, content in the knowledge that what is right will inevitably triumph.

He gave his life, as so many of our forefathers did, for his principles.

And it is thanks to his strength of character and his God-given talents that the dream he spoke about so eloquently will live on forever.

Even when quoting his final speech, titled, I've been to the mountaintop, we often misinterpret it.

The mountaintop is portrayed as King's final prophecy, with the promised land of equality just within reach.

But really, the mountaintop was a moment of clarity for King, who saw that his work had just been a first step in a long road through the wilderness.

We here at the Atlantic want to remember that work.

In that final speech, in which King seemed to foresee his death the next day, he ended by quoting the battle hymn of the Republic, first published in the Atlantic in 1862, and the theme to this show.

It is not a celebration of accomplishment, but a call to action, a witness to the glory that could be.

Well, I don't know what will happen now.

We've got some difficult days ahead.

But it really doesn't matter with me now

because I've been to the mountaintop.

I don't mind.

Like anybody, I would like to live

a long life.

Longevity has its place.

But I'm not concerned about that now.

I just want to do God's will.

And he's allowed me to go up to the mountain.

And I've looked over.

And I've seen

the promised land.

I may not get there with you.

But I want you to know tonight

that we as a people will get to the promised land

so I'm happy tonight I'm not worried about anything I'm not fearing any man mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord

Mike and Alyssa are always trying to outdo each other.

When Alyssa got a small water bottle, Mike showed up with a four-litre junk.

When Mike started gardening, Alyssa started beekeeping.

They called a truce for their holiday and used Expedia Trip Planner to collaborate on all the details of their trip.

Once there, Mike still did more laps around the pool.

Whatever.

You were made to outdo your holidays.

We were made to help organize the competition.

Expedia, made to travel.

We're back and we're joined now by Van Newkirk, who you heard from in our first segment.

But we're also joined by Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic.

Hi, Jeff.

Hi, Matt.

And Van.

Hey.

Also with us here in the studio in DC is Adrian Green, the managing editor of The Atlantic.

Hello, Adrian.

Hi.

How are you doing?

Also, Adrian.

Hi.

Hey.

Okay.

Glad we got that out of the way.

Yes.

So, context for this conversation.

Our listeners should know that Van and Adrian were the ones who had the idea to develop a special issue marking the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Dr.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Van, what made you want to do this?

So

I was thinking about the upcoming 50th anniversary around this time last year, actually around the 49th anniversary.

And I remembered when the 50th anniversary of

the March on Washington happened and people were sort of really working up about how the country has changed since 1963, what's happened since then.

And I thought maybe that's not quite the right anniversary to do that retrospective on.

Because between 1963 and 1968, you have so much happening in the world of policy.

You have the Voting Rights Act, you have the Civil Rights Act, you have all the significant moments that we have in King's life outside of the Dream Speech happen in that five-year window.

And the Montgomery bus boycott before them.

So I started thinking,

what really, since these major policy actions that have been implemented, how has the country changed since then?

And

again, since we published Letter from Birmingham Jail, how has the country changed since then?

How have we,

the magazine that was founded by white moderates,

if we're real about it, how did that magazine, how did the country full of white moderates respond to his message and change or how did it not change?

One of the interesting, just let me add one thing to that.

One of the interesting things that Adrian and Van told me that I found so compelling was that they did not want to do a kind of gauzy life magazine.

Here are some pictures of Martin Luther King.

And they didn't want to necessarily focus on that moment that we have that's frozen in amber of the I Have a Dream speech, 1963.

I said, let's actually do journalism around the legacy.

of King.

And wherever that journalism takes us, that's where the journalism takes us.

So the issue is not, I mean, it's a beautiful issue and it is commemorative in many ways, but it's actually a live piece of journalism around a set of subjects that animated King, as Van says, particularly in the years 1963, 1968, when I think a lot of people sort of check out historically in a kind of way.

Well, and that's why I think the assassination is an important moment for this commemoration.

It's a tragedy.

It's not something you usually would commemorate.

But for us, it's important because it's sort of the key moment in, like we say in the first segment,

where King the Man dies and where King the Myth is born.

And what this magazine does, what we try to do here, was examine the myth-making, the difference between King the Man and King the Myth.

And that's, I think, the substantive portion of what we do here.

Another thing our listeners should know is that, if I may say it, this special issue is remarkable.

It includes not only many of the extraordinary words and ideas of of King himself, but also a collection of responses to his life and legacy by some of the sharpest writers and creators of our time, from Jasmine Ward to Clint Smith, Latoya Ruby Frazier, Matthew Desmond, Reverend William Barber, even Bernice King, daughter of the man himself.

Adrian, how did you come up with this set of voices?

I think it was a really important thing for us to have as diverse a set of voices as possible, particularly because this was a really important moment for us journalistically.

I was doing a lot of work in the archives before we began this process, and, you know, we're a magazine that began based on, you know, the abolition of slavery, and we have voices like W.E.B.

Du Bois and the contemplation of race and civil rights is a part of our fabric here.

But we didn't actually have a whole lot of content around this specific moment.

And so this was our time.

This was our time to create pieces and speak with writers that could really really drill down on that moment for us as an institution and kind of reconcile what has happened in the 50 years since.

And so, writing to authors like Jesmond Ward and Eve Ewing and Clint Smith, all the people that you mentioned, are people that in their specific areas think really critically about history.

And that's something that's really important to us here at the Atlantic and making history kind of a live journalistic act, kind of like Jeff said.

Once you had decided on a set of writers and voices and artists and what have you to include in the issue,

then

there was a process of actually putting the book together,

of actually creating the magazine itself.

What did you discover in that process as you were both investigating, exploring, and interrogating the life and death of King himself, but also as you were reading the pieces that were coming in and weighing in on drafts in the process of putting this issue together?

What stuck out to you as your discoveries?

I think that Martin Luther King Jr.

had such an impact, and I know that that's a really cliché thing to say, but I think I didn't realize

the impact that he had on the thinking of people like Jasmine Ward, how he obviously shaped his daughter's life and listening to Bernice King and negotiating with the King family about how their father's legacy has been misunderstood and how they have worked their lives and still continue to work kind of live in the narrative that he would have wanted.

And I think that that was an incredible process and one that kind of failed in some ways and succeeded in other ways.

Say more about that.

I think it was really an interesting process to think of pieces like, oh, we want something on economics because that was something that Dr.

King believed very deeply in, but isn't the largest part of his story.

We wanted to talk to Reverend Barbara about the Poor People's Campaign.

We wanted to talk about incarceration and mass incarceration and how that narrative has changed from the time that King was sitting and writing a letter from a Birmingham jail to now when that is such a huge part of the Zeitgeist.

And I just thought that that process was so interesting to see how everything is spirited in the same way.

Ben, how about you?

For me, I want to give a whole lot of credit, shout out to the King Family and King Center for helping guide us through his documents.

Because for me, the one most

shocking and incredible thing about this process, especially the process of curation of King's own works that we do in this magazine, was

sitting down with King's work from the archive and seeing just how incredibly prolific he was.

He contained multitudes as a person from the magazine.

I hope you walk away with the sense that

you have King the economist, you have King the sociologist, you have King

the theologian, you have king of all these different modes of thought, and not just modes of thought, but modes of writing, modes of reaching people through his words, that

we only get a very small filtered sliver of that output.

What we tried to do here was go deep, do some of the deep cuts, find out where things he was saying, you know, some of the common phrases he had, where they came from.

And with the King family, the King Center, we were able to do that.

And I think that's just

a remarkable new understanding of who King himself was.

Aaron Trevor Brandon, it's the deep cuts edition of The Atlantic.

I like that.

The thing that it reminds you of is that before Martin Luther King Jr.

was popular, he was very unpopular.

And before we've kind of homogenized him to be

the secular saint of American history, and we have a day that honors him, and we honor him mainly by going furniture shopping and car shopping.

Before all that, not everyone, but clearly the country is, you know, sort of just accepted Martin Luther King the holiday and Martin Luther King the person as this generally acceptable notion.

He was hugely unpopular, hugely controversial, and hugely radical also.

And that's one of the things that Van and Adrian have done in this is

part of the issue is organized around what King referred to as the three main evils, the three evils, racism, poverty, militarism.

We don't often talk about the militarism piece of it, but obviously King was existing in the framework of the Vietnam controversy, and it's broader than just Vietnam.

And so, I mean, the great thing here, the really exciting thing is what Van and Adrian have done and the editors that they worked with has brought King, I really think, back to life as a whole, not just as a plaster saint, not just as a guy we have this holiday for, and a reminder of why he was so unpopular among the vast majority of white Americans.

I mean, this is the thing.

This is what we do with American history is we try to trick ourselves into thinking that things were much better than they were.

But this is a guy who was hated and hunted.

Obviously, he was hunted by a white supremacist, but hunted by the FBI, hunted by the apparatus of the state.

And I think one of the things here is what we restore to King some of his radicalism.

Yeah.

Jeff, I was curious for your perspective as the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic.

One of the facts, we have this extraordinary archive, but it has, of course, gaps.

And one of the curious gaps is in 1968.

After Dr.

King was murdered, the Atlantic was mostly silent.

The Atlantic, which five years earlier had published an excerpt of a letter from Birmingham Jail, and so was clearly aware of this man's impact and the force of his ideas.

They did not know that King existed.

Exactly.

Managed to mark

his death with a throwaway mention in a story about the Freedom Rides late in 1968.

What caused that absence?

Okay, so Matt,

I get blamed for everything.

I was three years old, so I have no idea.

I'm happy to take the blame for everything that happens in the last 10 to 15 years of the Atlantic.

But

in this case,

I'm actually fascinated by that, and I was prompted.

We should actually do this.

Here, you're watching the assignment process live on Radio Atlantic.

It'd actually be interesting to try to go back to any of the editors.

And I think we have some editors from that period who might still be alive and ask them that, because I have no idea.

It's a remarkable omission.

Now, of course, we're a magazine, and magazines are not obligated to cover everything in the way that a newspaper is, a TV show is, or whatever.

But it still seems like that was one of the big things that happened in 1968.

It's one of the biggest things that happened in American history.

And it is a mystery to me.

And it's not as if, as you point out, the editors at the time were predisposed necessarily against King, against the civil rights movement.

So it could have been, look, we all make magazines here, so we know that sometimes just because you want to do something doesn't mean it gets done.

There could be a banal procedural reason why it didn't happen.

But

it is a mystery.

And I think Adrian should get on the phone and find some old editors of The Atlantic and ask them what was going on.

I don't know if we have anybody who's alive from that period, actually, tell you the truth, but it would have been interesting to figure out.

Ben, you spent a lot of time in our archives as well as King's.

Did you gain any insights about that period in our?

Well, I think the biggest insight that I've gained is

we do have some of the preeminent voices in shaping the racial conversation in American history.

they've all written for the pages of the Atlantic.

We've had King, of course, he wrote a letter from Birmingham Jail entitled The Negro is Your Brother.

And

the story of why the headline was changed.

You know that story?

Yes.

It does not look favorably on the Atlantic.

That's fine.

It seems very pleading.

You know, it's like a beseeching, pleading kind of headline rather than just a straightforward letter from Birmingham Jail.

That your brother definitely

assumes a your.

Right, right, right, right.

There was no assumption there of any black readers on the part of the editors.

And actually, the title sort of just uh i it's it doesn't really fit with the body of the letter, if you think about it.

Yeah, it's it he's he's not really talking about a har harmonious message here.

It's a Booker T.

Washington headline on a WWE

piece.

So what's the story?

So it was letter from Birmingham Jail.

There was not a proper title per se for it.

And it was run in some smaller outlets before the Atlantic

the big fish came and gobbled it up.

It's unclear, actually, how

the rights for running it were obtained then with the Atlantic.

And it's also unclear how that title

was put on it.

It just became The Negro is your brother.

And that's how people, many people first saw it.

And that's not with the King family or estate's sort of approval at the time, not with King's approval.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: One of the documents that we print in full in this special issue is King's letter from Birmingham Jail.

And listeners, if you have not read this letter or have not read it recently, I highly recommend that you do because the letter is genuinely astonishing.

The context of it is worth remembering.

It's addressed to my dear fellow clergyman

because it is, among other things, a response to a letter from a bunch of clergymen, white clergymen, who were arguing that King was an interloper and that he and his band of outsiders were trying to move too quickly on civil rights and that if they just butt out, things in Birmingham would get worked out all in due time.

King forcefully addresses himself to what he calls the white moderate, and this is the type of person that some might today call woke.

Here's what King says in one striking passage, quote, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate.

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the white citizens' counselor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to order than to justice, who prefers a negative peace, which is the absence of tension, to a positive peace, which is the presence of justice.

Man.

What do you read in that letter?

So I think the most striking thing when you look at the the letter from Birmingham Jail is it's written in anger.

King is an angry man when he's writing this thing in the margins of the Birmingham newspaper in jail.

He's not happy.

Jail will kind of piss you off.

Yeah, he's not happy.

But if you look at it, he's identifying, I think for the first time in

a big written document from him, where the actual locus of power is in the racial conversation.

Originally, you know, you have King fighting against the easily sort of caricatured people in this story, the bull Connors of the story, right?

You know, you have the people who are open bigots, who go out and beat black people with their billy clubs, who go and lynch black folks.

Those are the villains of the original civil rights story.

But when King starts thinking about how we actually move this thing forward,

how you get to the actual place of equality, not just being able to sit in the front of the buses, not just being able to have your kids go to school, but have them be able to go to school in a place that actually welcomes them, have them be able to have an actually equal education, having transit be equal, having jobs and wages be equal, and how to actually approach what he saw as his life's work, which was true equality of opportunity and

of justice.

So he sees, he looks and sees that the limiter of access, of opportunity in this country is not those

couple folks who like to wear Klan robes on the weekend.

It's the moderates, the people who control government, the people who control the clergy.

It's the suburbanites whose public approval of King sort of waxed and waned with his different policy decisions.

The people who would watch TV and could sympathize enough with black kids being beaten and hosed and bit by dogs to where they could support maybe the Voting Rights Act, but those then saw the Voting Rights Act as the end of the road for equality.

And King saw those folks as the actual power structure of the country, the economic system they favored.

One of the things that's interesting about this three major evils is sometimes he vacillates between on the evil of poverty, between poverty, materialism, and capitalism as a

name of that evil.

So he's actually identifying the behaviors of the majority of Americans,

what they've been indoctrinated with, as the source of of why African Americans and poor folks can't move forward.

It's all coming together in this letter, I think.

And again, it's make him angry.

He's thinking about why he's in jail for advocating nonviolent protest.

He's, for the first time, I think, understanding where his path in life leads

and seeing how much work is in front of him.

And all those things.

It's again, it's addressed to clergy members.

And I think it's important because he was a clergy member first and foremost, and he's speaking in a very religious,

ecumenical sort of way.

But he's talking to the world here and talking to the people who actually control the levers of power and not just the bigots who ran Jim Crow.

Adrian, I wanted to ask you about the reality of Dr.

King.

So I think a lot of folks reading the letter from Birmingham Jail, especially a lot of folks who consider themselves

progressive, to use a term, will feel implicated by it and by his coming out, I mean, in particular, at late moderates.

There is something about the myth.

There's a reason that the myth of Dr.

King was created.

There was something about the myth that people wanted to believe in and something that they wanted to honor, this sainted martyr who was not controversial, who advocated for peace rather than anything as tawdry as forceful civil disobedience.

Do you think that there is anything useful in that myth remaining?

Do we lose anything by facing the reality of King, his activism, and his ministry?

I don't think the myth is useful.

I think the myth is useful like only

insofar as it helps us recognize that we do this to make people digestible and to not have to deal with their contradictions and not to have people operate as like real humans in the world.

And I think that, you know, distilling king down just to you know a man that wore a suit and fought for peace um and allowing him to exist in the world that as as only that um

absolves you of dealing with all of the rest of it um and i think that that's a really complicated process for people right we talk about virtue signaling signaling here all the time um

Ascribing to the myth of Dr.

King is a version of that, right?

It's to say that like, of course, I support the idea of this black man, this respectable man who marched across, you know, miles and led people toward

a decisive idea of what peace is supposed to look like.

Not having to deal with the way in which there was friction between him and his contemporaries, the way that he contradicted himself, the way that his ideologies evolved over time

is a much easier thing to do.

Aaron Powell, there's a really good chance that, I mean, the vast majority of whites in America today say, oh, yeah, Martin Luther King, great American hero.

Really, really good chance that these same white people in America today, if you project them back 50 years,

would have really heartily disapproved of King, his methodology, his radicalism, his message on a whole set of issues.

I mean, that seems to me a clear.

There's no way to poll the past, but it seems fairly obvious to me that

he became popular with whites only after he was

safely gone as an agitator.

But we do have polls of the past.

We know what people thought then, yes.

The year he was killed, top 10 Americans in popularity in the Gallup poll, number 10, I believe, was George Wallace.

Top 10 most disapproved, number six was MLK.

Right.

I want to turn to the present day for a moment.

And Jeff, I've got a question for you.

I think that for a lot of black Americans, when the Obamas campaigned for the presidency, they held their breaths and they kept holding their breaths until the day that power was peacefully

population.

But this was a legacy in part of having lost Dr.

King.

Yeah.

What do you think has been the effect of the Obamas actually living out their term in office, going on to a peaceful transition of power and becoming citizens again?

Well, thank God, I mean, God bless, right?

But, you know, it's interesting.

People always forget this, but

if you're making a list of George W.

Bush's achievements, as a very serious point, George W.

Bush, very early on in the, when he was president, early on in the Democrat, in the primary process,

ordered the Secret Service to give Barack Obama the most intense security package that you could get.

I'm sure he had this on advice from security experts and everything else, but he made the exact right choice given a reality.

He understood the consequences and understood the possibilities there.

And that's something that nothing happened, thank God, so we don't talk about that.

But that was important.

You know, it is also true, and I don't have the exact numbers, but I remember in covering Obama all those years, the threats against him were extraordinary.

I mean, they came in at a more rapid clip, and they were all sort of of a type, if you know what I mean.

And the Secret Service had a lot, a lot of resources deployed against,

let's just say,

the special nature of the Obama presidency, you know what I mean, in terms of white supremacy and all the rest.

When Obama was president, you were one of the, you were then a reporter.

I was a journalist.

Yes.

And you spent more time with him than almost any other reporter

around.

Obama

faced in some ways a challenge that would have been very familiar to King in office of being

looked to as the most prominent black leader of his moment

and being riven on the one hand, had pressures from his right, to put it simplistically, from white moderates,

and having pressures also from his left, progressives from a number of different racial and ethnic backgrounds, who felt that he was not moving fast enough, that he was not radical enough in his movements.

How did he navigate that?

He was very aware of that tension and of where he was situated within it.

And how did he navigate that in office from perspective?

It's a very interesting question.

First of all, you know the joke about the Obama anger translator, right?

I actually think that the real Obama anger translator might have been Michelle in a kind of way.

I can't speak out of school here, but I would say that the general tendency of Barack Obama, and this is why he achieved what he achieved, is to

he didn't get very high and he didn't go very low, you know, in terms of depression or excitement or elation.

He was very, very clinical about everything.

I think my impression from watching them all these years is that is that Michelle Obama, and we'll find out in her book that's coming out later this year, I think she understood the pressures on him in a way and internalized them better than he did.

I'm not saying that she was pushing him to go harder on certain issues or to downplay respectability politics, which is a thing that he did periodically.

And our colleague Tonasi Coates has written a lot about that.

I mean, man, this is a subject of a couple of books, you know, how he navigated.

I remember very well talking to Tavis Smiley

way back 10 years ago, who was upset that Barack Obama didn't announce his candidacy at,

what is it, like the BET summit?

Was that?

Or like Tavis had a big meeting, and he was like, I can't believe that Obama would do this in Springfield and not do it at.

And the Obama thing the whole time was: I'm not running for president of black America.

In order to gain the presidency, I have to win white people because white people make up the majority of this country.

And he navigated everything with that in mind.

And I think that was painful for a lot of people around him.

Obviously, sometimes this expressed itself in really kind of florid ways, the criticism of people like Cornell West, for instance.

But

I think only a person with his emotional, dispositional characteristics could have survived the intense intense pressure of both being a symbol of the race and also having to serve as president of the United States and

not telling America all that he knew about America.

That's probably the way I would put it.

And I think we're going to find in Michelle Obama's book a little bit more of that telling.

Yeah.

Bane, I'm curious for your answers to this question.

I mean, I think one of that act of navigation for King is one that characterizes every prominent black leader today at a variety of different levels of prominence.

How do you think he navigated that?

And how do you think his successors have navigated it on their own?

Yeah, I don't even know if this is a like purposefully internalized thing that Obama and perhaps lots of other successful black men especially have,

but it seems clear to me that one of the main lessons about king in terms of success is that you can't be king the man and be president.

You can be what people believe to be king the myth to be and be president, but you cannot be king the man.

Peace for love.

Right.

You can wear a suit.

You can be totally respectable.

You can preach sort of broad platitudes about red and blue America.

and coming together and you can echo the dream speech.

You can build a persona around it.

Lots of black men have done just that and become successful.

There's one in the Senate now who has Corey Booker.

He's done the same thing.

But the flip side of that lesson is you can't be an

anti-capitalist black man and become president.

You can't speak out necessarily as forcefully as King did against white moderates.

and become president.

King was assassinated.

What was not safe for him?

What Barack Obama understood that an angry black man goes nowhere in American politics or in public life?

It's just too scary for most white people.

And off-putting because they're like, why is he so angry?

Even if it's righteous anger, you can't be angry.

You can't show anything beyond.

Actually, I think this is probably the biggest legacy of King, and it's probably detrimental in some ways for black men, is you have to be not King the man again, you have to be King the symbol.

White folks have sort of accepted one version of black masculinity as acceptable now, and that's what they believe King to be, what we're taught in school that King was.

And so everybody, if you want to be president, if you want to be a CEO, if you want to lead anything, you have to follow some version of that.

And that, I think, is

one of the major stories of Obama's candidacy and presidency.

Obviously, there are a lot of ways of pulling together coalitions and being an activist.

And many of our most prominent leaders of today's civil rights movements and movements like Black Lives Matter are not black men.

They're many activists of many different stripes, and many of them have, I think, departed in some ways from the legacy of Dr.

King.

Adrienne, I wanted to ask you about this.

A couple years ago, I interviewed DeRay McKesson on stage, and he mentioned this.

We know that we didn't invent resistance, we didn't discover injustice, but like I don't necessarily have to live in the shadow of King every day that I think about this work, right?

He was was not the first organizer or the only organizer, but was an important organizer, right?

Breen Newsom, the activist who climbed the flagpole in South Carolina and took down the Confederate flag from the state house, recently wrote about her grappling with King's legacy in our King Issue.

What do you think that today's activists, how do you think that they're approaching this question?

How does King's experience, how do other experiences of activism then and since informed their approach today?

I think that one thing that activists today that I've noticed take away from King's legacy is the recognition that these intergenerational tensions, the idea that we're juxtaposing Black Lives Matter activists, for example, against people like King that led the civil rights movement, that these tensions always exist, right?

And that

If we're to believe that having a multiplicity of ideas is the thing that sharpens us as a society, then these tensions are inherent and should be expected and not pushed back against.

And so one of the ways that that presents itself is a rejection of respectability politics, the way that we spoke of before.

It's not a coincidence that two times in this issue, people mention that both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King were assassinated when wearing suits, right?

I think that that is such a small detail, but it speaks so much more broadly about people's understanding of exactly what Van mentioned before: that there's an acceptable version of the way to practice activism and

understanding that advancement for black people, many and most of the time, is punctuated by tragedy.

And I think that I think that that's developed into people having a really constructive conversation about empathy and selective empathy and

being able to realize that, you know, when a 17-year-old kid is, you know, murdered in a bombing in Austin, right, that the thing that doesn't give us empathy for him is the fact that, you know, he was accepted to one of the most prestigious music conservatories.

You know, it's the fact that, you know, he's a black kid.

And if he, you know, was the kid kid with his middle finger up on Instagram, he's deserving of that same empathy, right?

That we've moved on from the ability to qualify people's worth based on their ability to wear the suit and do that successfully.

Or at least that's my, that's my hope of what we're grappling with.

I don't think that there's a better way to end this conversation than that.

So I think we're going to bring this one to a close.

There are no keepers this week.

Although listeners, I would still love you to tell us, what do you not want to forget?

Call and leave us your answer in a voicemail at 202-266-7600.

In place of keepers, we leave you with this.

On April 3rd, 1968, his last full day on earth, in his last public speech, King's closing words were, Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

And so, once again, we will close with John Batiste's immaculate rendition of the song those words are drawn from in its entirety.

First,

thank you to all of my interlocutors today and co-disputents.

Jeff, Adrian, fan.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

And now a few credits.

This episode was produced and edited by Kevin Townsend with production support from Kim Lau.

Thanks to Van Newkirk for our opening segment, to our colleague Adrian Green for joining us in the second, and as always, to my esteemed co-host, Jeffrey Goldberg.

Catch us at facebook.com/slash radioatlantic and theatlantic.com slash radio and subscribe in your preferred podcast app.

Don't miss the detailed show notes we've left you in our episode description.

Thank you, as always, for listening.

May the memory of Dr.

King, the real Dr.

King, charge you anew with the knowledge of how far humankind has left to travel towards equality.

We'll see you next week.

And now, the Battle Hymn of the Republic.

All

in glory.

under coming of the Lord.

Yet the traps and divines wear the great rattle sword

and losing faithful light and of the terrible Swiss war

his troop is marching on

glory glory

hallelujah

Glory, glory, highly