My guest tonight is an amazing writer at The Atlantic
who helped produce a special commemorative issue
of the magazine called "King"--
a look at the life and legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Please welcome Vann Newkirk.
(applause and cheering)
-Welcome to the show. -Thanks for having me.
Man, I've been a fan of your writing for so long.
You touch on so many different topics,
you know, from Black Panther through to, uh,
racism in America, the Second Amendment.
One of the more interesting, uh, conversations
that I got started because of your writing
was specifically about teachers being armed,
and you argued that in its very essence,
it goes against the Second Amendment.
Why would you make that argument?
Yeah, so, the Second Amendment is supposed to be this thing
-that, uh, protects people from the government. -Right.
The whole entire ethos of it is,
you get people, you give them guns,
and you give them guns so they can build a militia
to protect themselves against tyranny.
Right.
And so, you have teachers, who are state agents, right--
paid by the state-- who are taking care of our kids,
who have sometimes done bad things to those kids,
and you're giving 'em guns.
-Uh, so, especially in Florida... -Right, right.
You have a guy who was known
to use the "N" word with his students,
and was suspended for doing it.
-You give that guy a gun. For what? -Right.
-That's the tyrannical government. -Yeah.
I never thought of that as an idea. I go...
Like, but, you know, it's one of those ideas
where people go, "Like, this seems like a good idea
because everything leads to more guns."
You go like, "Just give the people more guns,
"and then it solves the guns,
-because if everyone has a gun..." -Right.
then I guess it means no one has a gun."
-I don't know how it works. -Well, I give my gun a gun.
-Yeah, you give your gun a gun. -Yeah.
That's the most important... 'Cause guns don't kill people.
-Right. -People kill people, so if you give the peo...
What about guns killing guns?
I-I don't think a gun has ever...
A gun has killed a gun. I saw that in a movie once.
-The gun shot the gun, and the gun... -Yeah.
No one talks about gun-on-gun violence.
(laughter)
You have an interesting way of looking at the world,
and this issue of The Atlantic, I think,
looks at Martin Luther King from so many different places
and through so many different lenses,
which I really found interesting.
Martin Luther King is one of those figures in America
that I've always felt is mythologized,
and oftentimes misunderstood.
And it feels like you've captured that in this article.
Why did you think it was necessary
to have an entire article about Martin Luther King, Jr.?
So, what we want to do is challenge people, you know?
We want people to read every single article in this issue
-and come away thinking about something new. -Right.
Something they had never thought about,
something they never even fathomed about Dr. King.
And what that does as a whole is...
So many times, politicians bring up,
or people who have an agenda bring up Dr. King.
They quote the "Dream" speech.
They do the same thing.
Okay, you want us to live in a colorblind society
where our kids can go to school together.
They quote this one part, but they don't quote the part
about him being against the Vietnam War.
They don't say, uh, his speech,
his "Letter from Birmingham Jail,"
where he talks about the white moderate.
And nobody asks themselves, "Am I the white moderate?"
-Right. -So nobody...
Everybody now is pro King, and not racist,
but nobody's reading King now for how to be anti-racist.
It's interesting that you say that,
because there was a specific article,
or piece of it, that connected with me
written by you.
In this... and it was...
specifically about the idea of Martin Luther King
and his assassination, and you say here,
"In the official story told to children,
"King's assassination is the transformational tragedy
"in a victorious struggle to overcome.
"But in the true accounting, his assassination
"was one of a host of reactionary assaults
"by a country against a revolution,
and those assaults were astonishingly successful."
-Yeah. -That's an interesting point of view,
'cause many people feel like
Martin Luther King being assassinated
was the beginning of the great journey
that got black people to where they needed to be.
And you're arguing that it ended a revolution that was starting.
How do you prove that? Or why do you believe that?
So, I remember when I was in school
and I had a teacher who told me, straight up,
that the civil rights movement was victorious,
-Right. -that we won, that we... we won.
And what I could never reconcile was, how did we win
if Dr. King was assassinated while protesting?
How did we win the civil rights movement,
how were we victorious if while protesting
for higher wages for sanitation workers in Memphis,
he was assassinated,
-Right. -and his poor people's movement was derailed?
So, I always want to revisit that point,
and so when I wrote that essay,
I was listening to Nina Simone's song,
"Why (The King of Love Is Dead)"
-Right. -She wrote it three days after he was assassinated.
And she's talking about, will the country stand or fall?
She's talking about a country
that seemed then on the verge of an apocalypse.
-Right. -And so I really wanted to go back to that moment
and see how we get from that moment,
where you're talking about the end of the world,
the black community in shambles, in tears, in unrest and riots,
and how you go from there to here, 50 years, and say we won.
How does that happen?
People would say: But, Vann, look at how much progress
black people have made since Martin Luther King.
Surely things have gotten better.
Black people are on the up in America.
Well, some studies are showing that that may not be the case.
So we've got some studies out
from the Economic Policy Institute that are saying
that black wealth, black home ownership rates,
segregation in schools haven't gone anywhere in 50 years.
-50 years? -In 50 years.
So what are we talking about here?
We're saying that the gap between blacks and whites now
in terms of wealth is just so staggering
that it's... how do you even build policy to bridge that gap?
Uh... education has risen,
but our kids are now in schools that are as segregated
as they were in 1970.
So what are we talking about?
That's an interesting point of view,
and I guess, I know a lot of people argue back on that,
and they'll say, "Well, I mean, Obama became president, Vann,
so, I mean, uh, that's progress, isn't it?"
Yeah. Obama was president, uh, eight years,
and now will we ever have another black president?
Will you ever have another president,
-is the question I ask. -(laughter)
Um... here's something that I really connected with,
and I guess, because of South Africa's history,
and also because it is International Women's Day,
is this beautiful quote in the-in the article.
"Women have been the backbone
"of the whole Civil Rights movement.
"This popular narrative of the Civil Rights movement
"too often relies on great men,
"the great men version of history.
"King, Malcolm X, Thurgood Marshall,
"Stokely Carmichael, other names, you know,
"and it ignores the importance of women
"who also organized and led the movement,
"and shows how their contributions
have been sidelined, hidden in plain sight."
That is a powerful narrative that many people forget,
and that is Coretta Scott King wasn't just a sidekick.
She wasn't just the woman at home.
Why do you think it's so important
to acknowledge these women, and what were they instrumental
in doing in many movements?
Yeah. I learned a lot reading
that essay from Jean D.O. Harris.
She was talking about Coretta, Coretta Scott King,
and how Martin's development, politically,
came from conversation with Coretta.
So a lot of what he was doing
was sort of mansplaining Coretta, right?
He was going out and saying,
okay, she was against the Vietnam War years before he was.
-Wow. -She, when they were courting each other,
and, uh, and when they were still dating,
she was the one who was sort of giving him these economic ideas,
passing him along text about what to read
and how to learn and grow.
So you look at-- if you look at Coretta, Coretta Scott King,
not just as King's helpmate,
as someone who was an activist in her own right,
you start looking at just all these other women
in the movement who did so much:
Rosa Parks, who was an operative.
We're taught in school that she was
a tired old lady who sat down.
She was out there, she built the same organizing structures
that, actually, King relied on when he was doing the boycotts.
Those were built by black women against sexual assault.
-That's powerful. -The same things, yeah.
So when you, when you look at these stories,
how do you think it plays out?
Because Martin Luther King exists in a place
where some people use him to stage a protest,
and others go, "we should use him to sell trucks in America."
Um, everyone sees him in a different light.
If Martin Luther King were around today,
from what you have read and what you've learned,
like, how happy do you think he would be?
Would he think people have reached a mountaintop?
I think, from reading him,
his thing was never being satisfied
with where we are, because there's always space.
A mountaintop, in that speech,
wasn't the place where we need to be in terms of race.
The mountaintop was having the vision
to see where we needed to go, and, I think, that vision
was that the road is ever, everlasting.
The moral arc of the universe
is-is always bending towards justice, and we bend it.
So I-I think King would, he would be protesting,
regardless of whatever situation
is on the ground right now in America,
he would be protesting, 'cause that's what he does.
That's what an activist does, they're always agitating.
And so that's what I want people to take away from the magazine,
is that his activism was always at agitating.
It was always moving forward, and progressing.
And you see in the last year of his life,
-before he was assassinated, -Right.
he sat down and thought, "How do I move this forward?"
And he came forward with the most ambitious program
to fight poverty, to fight militarism,
and to fight racism across the globe.
And that was King.
That was King.
It's an amazing article.
-Thank you so much for being here. -Thank you.
It's an amazing issue of The Atlantic.
King. The special commemorative issue of The Atlantic
is on newsstands now through May, and you can go
to theatlantic.com/mlk to purchase a copy.
Vann Newkirk, everybody.