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BlackStory

BackStory Celebrates Black History Month with a Compilation

02.01.19

Nathan showcases some of BackStory’s best content about African American history in honor of Black History Month. In this episode, hear about one historian’s heartbreaking research into the human effects of lynching to the extraordinary story of Korla Pandit, the turban-wearing showman of California’s cocktail lounges. We’re also sharing a segment from “Scene On Radio” about the racial cleansing in Corbin, Kentucky that took place 100 years ago, but mostly remains hidden from the town’s official history. Note: This episode contains previously broadcast content.

Funding from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation is helping Virginia Humanities and BackStory, change the narrative of race and representation.

Black History Month; Black history

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Respectfully Yours, Gainer Atkins

Historian Kidada Williams studies lynching. For years, she read accounts of lynching in newspapers and public documents. But how she thought about lynching victims changed when she discovered letters written by a man named Gainer Atkins. Atkins wrote the NAACP seeking justice for his son, Charlie, who was murdered by a mob in Davisboro, Georgia.

Read some of the correspondence between Gainer Atkins and Walter White (provided by Kidada Williams).

Music:

Delican’t by Podington Bear

The Things We Save by Podington Bear

Georgia; NAACP; lynching; lynching photography; mob violencer; racial violence

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Speaker 1: Major funding for Back Story is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Robert and Joseph Cornell Memorial Foundation.

Speaker 2: From Virginia Humanities, this is Back Story.

Nathan Connelly: Welcome to Back Story. I’m [Nathan Connelly 00:00:24].
If you’re new to the show, each week, my colleagues [Brian Balogh 00:00:27], [Ed Ayers 00:00:28], [Joanne Freeman 00:00:29] and I explore the history behind the headlines.
Now, you may have heard our Back Story prize show a few weeks ago where we awarded the first ever Back Story Prize for public history to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. It opened in 2018, and is dedicated to the thousands of African-Americans who were lynched between 1877 and 1950.
The historian [Kidada Williams 00:00:53] studies racial violence targeting African-Americans, including the wave of lynching that began in the aftermath of the Civil War. Over the course of her research, she came across many accounts of lynchings. What is striking about lynching is that these weren’t secret crimes. Often, accounts of lynching would be published not only in local papers but in national outlets, like the New York Times. And while these accounts can give details of what happened the day of the lynching, they’re not usually sympathetic to the victim.

Speaker 4: Davisboro, Georgia, May 18th. Charles Atkins, a negro, 15 years old, one of four taken into custody today in connection with the killing of Mrs. Elizabeth [Kitchens 00:01:34], 20 years old, was burned at the stake tonight. The lynching occurred at the scene of the murder and followed an alleged confession from the 15 year old prisoner. He was tortured over a slow fire for 15 minutes, and then, shrieking with pain, was questioned concerning his accomplices.
Members of the mob, comprising nearly 2000 people, then raised the body again, fastened it to a pine tree with trace chains, and relighted the fire. More than 200 shots were fired into the charred body following the boy’s death.

Speaker 5: My dear Mr. White,
This is to acknowledge and to say that I received your very much appreciated letter. I wish to say here the purpose for my writing you was …

Gainer Atkins: … I am looking around for a good lawyer to bring suit against the state of Georgia for the lynching of my son at the age of 13 years old in the year 1922, 18th day of May, and I’m sending to your for information. The fact, the crowd tied a rope around my neck, and also tied me to a stump, and beat my wife almost to death. She has not been well from that time, and they kept me in jail for 21 months, and my wife in jail for seven months. I am now looking forward to bringing the matter to the state court just as soon as possible, or as soon as I can get some good lawyer to take the case up.
I’m getting old and miss the support of my family, and feel that the state should help me to bury this burden.
Thanking you for what you has done for me, and for what you are going to do. I wish to have a favorable answer soon.
Respectfully yours, Gainer Atkins

Kidada Williams: When African-Americans wrote the Department of Justice, or when they wrote the President of the United States, they often got a form letter back saying this is an issue that should be taken up with your state government. What’s curious that a number of African-Americans get that form letter, and they actually write back and say “I went to my state government first and they did nothing.”
You can also imagine him potentially writing to the local newspapers, but that would be less likely to occur because newspapers, especially the local ones where lynchings occurred, assume the guilt of the person who’s been lynched, and don’t really press down on the fact that, even if they had committed the crime, that they were still entitled to due process and equal protection under the law. They take the story that the mob crafts to justify the killings, and so if he writes out, that could be seen as a direct act of defiance, and there’s nothing to stop the newspaper from publishing the letter, including his address where he is, and putting a bullseye on his back.
The NAACP has, up to this point, positioned itself as an ally. They are going to investigate lynchings themselves. They are trying to get the family story out about the killings, so he’s writing to the NAACP because he’s hoping that they can help him get justice for himself and for his son.

Gainer Atkins: July 16th, 1926. 209 Taylor Street, Camden, New Jersey.
Dear sirs, I wrote you some time ago concerning what happened to me. Now, I will tell you the facts in this case to the very best of my knowledge.
May 1922 in Washington County, state of Georgia, my boy was lynched for killing a white woman that was carrying US Mail to Davisboro, Georgia. My boy was 13 years old at the time. His name was Charlie Atkins. He was lynched without any investigation by the people of Washington and Johnson Counties. And myself and my wife was beat near to death because it was said that my boy did the killing, and it was said shortly after this happened that a white man killed the woman and gave my boy her auto to make it appear that my boy did the killing since my boy knew no better than to let this man give him this auto.
Now, this is all for this time. Please let me hear from you by return mail as I would very much like to hear from you as quick as possible.
Yours truly, Gainer Atkins.

Kidada Williams: Both of the letters are written long hand. The handwriting is actually very neat, probably doesn’t have the fine literacy skills that some of our listeners might enjoy today, but even without that, you still get a sense of who he was as a person. And I can imagine him as a grieving father who’s been beaten, who’s been imprisoned, who has left his home community in order to be safe trying to do something, trying to have meaning in his life by giving a degree of justice for himself and his son. And so that, I feel on the page when I interact with the letter.
On July 26th, 1926, Walter White, Assistant Secretary from the NAACP, wrote Gainer Atkins back.
“My dear Mr. Atkins, I have your letter of the 16th relative to the lynching of your son. I am taking the matter up with well-informed people in Georgia. I will keep you advised of all developments. Yours very truly, Walter White.”
I don’t believe I have his initial response. Gainer’s letters refer to earlier correspondence with Walter White, and receiving information from him. For the letter that I shared with you all, there’s only the little bit that I just read, but what often happens with the first response, it is an expression of condolence, a hope to do what they can to help the family get justice, if that is at all possible.
Now, the challenge is that in the 1920s, the NAACP, they’re running out of fuel. They haven’t been able to get federal anti-lynching legislation passed, and they’re also beginning the slow process of trying to branch out beyond lynching, and take up segregation and education and other places of public accommodations. So part of what they are able to do at this point is to try to apply some pressure to the Governor to try to shame the state into taking some action because that’s their only recourse at this point. I don’t think that people like Gainer Atkins know that that’s the situation, the internal situation of the NAACP at this point. All he knows is that they’ve thrown him a lifeline.
With lynching victims, families, they feel as though they don’t have anything else to lose but to ask, and ask, and ask, and ask, and ask for more, for something to get them closer.
On September 7th, 1926, Gainer Atkins wrote another letter to Walter White.
“I wrote Mr. Alexander concerning the case …”

Gainer Atkins: … as you directed me to do, but I did not get very much satisfaction out of his letter, so I thought I would write to you again to see if you would write to the high sheriff of Washington County, Georgia, and also my lawyer, whose address is Sandersville, Georgia, Washington County. See if you can get any information from them concerning this case.
I’m getting older now, and feels the need of my child, and also the time that these people caused me to lose and suffer, so I want to ask you to do all that you can for me. In good many ways, this burdens my heart, so do all you can for me. The loss of my child is worse than all this.
I want to consult the government concerning the matter that I once asked you to direct me as to just how to get at the matter. My lawyer, Mr. Evans, is the man that cleared myself and my wife of this crime, but my child is gone. He suffered death. My wife suffered for a long time also, and also myself. So answer soon.
Respectfully yours, Gainer Atkins.

Kidada Williams: What stands out in the letter is Gainer Atkins’s palpable grief and agony at losing his boy. It’s obvious that he’s deeply affected by the killing, and his beating, and his imprisonment, and I think that, for me, what the letter does is it connects Charles, or “Charlie,” as his family called him, to community. It says that even though he was isolated from his people at the time of his death, that he was fully human, that he was part of a family that grieved his death long after it occurred. And for me, I think that that’s really important because it shows a very different side of lynching that we don’t get when we look at the newspapers.
And if I can, I’ll also connect that to part of what we’re seeing with the New Legacy Museum down in Montgomery. One of the things that they’ve been able to do is to do something historians haven’t done, which is connect directly to families. And there are publications, and the documentaries that they’re working on, and even in the museum itself, they are bringing the story of lynching victims’ families, lynching victims’ connectedness to communities to light.
It’s letters like Gainer’s that, at least for me, caused the course correction in the nature of my research. The writing that I did on lynching was distant, impersonal. It was discovering Gainer’s letter that changed that because I now saw Charlie. I had to ground them. I had to ground those victims, connect those victims to their people because that’s how they were in life as letters like Gainer’s really reveals to me.

Nathan Connelly: Kidada Williams is a historian at Wayne State University, and author of They Left Great Marks on Me: African-American Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War I.

A Racial Cleansing in America from “Scene on Radio”

In 1919, a white mob forced the entire black population of Corbin, Kentucky, to leave, at gunpoint. It was one of many racial expulsions in the United States. Host of Scene on Radio John Biewen, investigates.

Kentucky; explusion; mob violence; racial violence

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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100 years ago this year, a white mob forced the entire black population of Corbin, Kentucky, to leave the town at gunpoint. It was one of many racial expulsions in the United States, but if you were looking for an account of the incident, you would search the official histories of Corbin in vain.
Our friends at Scene On Radio investigated the story of what happened in Corbin and how it has all but disappeared from the public record. Until now. We join host John Biewen as he speaks to the Mayor of Corbin, Willard McBurney, a retired postal service manager.

Willard M.: People in my peer group, they said they had heard from their grandfathers or from their dads, and it was really just passed on down from generations, and that’s really the gist of my knowledge of this.

John Biewen: And what was it?

Willard M.: I heard that there was a group one night that forced a bunch of the blacks out of Corbin, but then I’ve heard that a lot of that, it wasn’t to that severity. That they were employed by the railroad company, and they did move some out, but then they brought them back in two weeks later to finish the job, and I think …

John Biewen: That is the railroad brought in another crew of black workers. In this version of the story, that’s proof that the expulsion was not about race. In fact, in affidavits collected for the state’s criminal investigation several months later, white eyewitnesses backed up the story told by the African-American men. They said the armed mob announced its intention to rid Corbin of black people, and that black baggage workers who tried to return a few days later were threatened and left again.

Speaker 10: I know that some of the Negroes who were compelled to leave Corbin were property owners, and had always been considered peaceful and law abiding.

Speaker 11: I do not consider that it would be safe for any of the Negroes to return to Corbin, Kentucky, at the present time.

John Biewen: As a result of the investigation in 1919, a man named [Steve Rogers 00:14:30], who had worked for the railroad, was convicted of leading the mob and spent two years in the Kentucky state penitentiary.
A lot of people in Corbin say there’s no point in dwelling on something that happened so long ago. That’s how Mayor McBurney feels. But at the same time, he admits the expulsion haunts his town and its image.

Willard M.: I had to go to a marketing meeting in Cincinnati.

John Biewen: McBurney remembers an incident in the late 1980s when he was working for the postal service.

Willard M.: There was probably over 100 of us in this meeting from various places …

John Biewen: The main speaker at the meeting was an African-American who’d flown in from Chicago.

Willard M.: And he was going through how our plans would do this, and that, and if any of us had any problems, he said, “Hey, I’ll personally come down and work with you on that, but,” he says, and he pointed his finger at me, he said, “I won’t come to Carbon.” That’s what he called Corbin. He said, “I will not come to Carbon.” And that really made me feel small, to feel singled out with a group of people. I knew that he had heard of the stigma that has followed Corbin, and I mean, there was someone from Chicago …

John Biewen: For decades after the race riot, Corbin was known as a white man’s town with a visible Klan presence. A town that would tolerate only a token handful of black people.
The criminal investigation did find that several whites stood up to the mob. A few protected black people in their homes or businesses, and as you heard, the local newspaper condemned the expulsion at the time. Journalist Elliot Jaspin says most people in Corbin and the other towns where racial expulsions took place don’t know this part of their history either.

Elliott Jaspin: When you have the fable, the heroic acts of the people in the community are lost. They lose their heroes.

John Biewen: Writer Silas House thinks white people in a place like Corbin are especially reluctant to talk about their town’s troubled past because of worries about eastern Kentucky stereotypes.

Silas House: Well, people think we’re all illiterate, ignorant hillbillies who are also racist and misogynistic and homophobic …

John Biewen: But the decades of silence from Corbin’s leaders may have backfired. Silas says by failing to publicly own up to the 1919 expulsion, Corbin has missed the chance to move past it.

Silas House: It was certainly talked about when I was a child, and when I was a teenager, and people still talk about it. They probably don’t talk about it to outsiders, but I think it’s important to talk about for several reasons. Number one, just to shed light on something that awful happening. Number two, it’s important to know about the place you’re from. Storytelling is important, and number three, it’s important to talk about because I don’t think that we live in that kind of place anymore, and to maybe shed some light on how different it is today.

Tim Thompson: (singing)

John Biewen: On the edge of Corbin, a congregation more than a century old meets in a sprawling, much newer building. Senior Pastor Tim Thompson of the First United Methodist Church says in August 2005, he was sitting in his office with some of his staff.

Tim Thompson: We were watching the news. Man, this thing is just wiped out New Orleans, and Biloxi, and all that coastline down there.

John Biewen: Thompson and his staff decided to turn their church into emergency housing for people who’d lost their homes to Hurricane Katrina.

Tim Thompson: I went up before the whole church on Sunday morning and said, “Here’s what we want to do.” We raised the issue. “We’re certain some of the folks that are going to come and live with us are going to be black. We’re certain of that,” and we just said, “Whatever. Whoever comes, we don’t care. It doesn’t matter. We’ll deal with it. It’ll be fine,” and so the congregation said, “Okay.”

John Biewen: The church hosted about 25 people from the Gulf Coast. They stayed in the church for weeks or months. About half were African-American.

Tim Thompson: Our hope was that maybe a few of the black folks that came would stay here and live, and become a Corbinite. Live in Corbin, and essentially become pioneers. So 15 or 20 years from now, there’s a growing population of black people in this town.

John Biewen: But a year and a half later, almost all of the dozen or so African-American guests from the Gulf Coast had gone back home or moved onto places like Louisville or Lexington. All except [David Sloan 00:19:46], who we heard at the top of the piece cutting his friend’s hair. David came to Corbin from Biloxi.

David Sloan: I’m thankful that the church had the vision to open up their door to bring us up here. I’m an adventurer. I’m a partier. I’ll try anything once.

John Biewen: When I met David, he was working in a cabinet factory in Corbin. He said he’d gotten some cold looks in town, and he thought unfair treatment in a couple of previous jobs.

David Sloan: A lot of people up here are stuck back in the 60s.

John Biewen: But he said Corbin had not lived up to its old image as a sundown town, a place where a black person better get out before dark or else. His 79 year old friend from nearby Barberville, [Laverta Boose 00:20:26], agrees. She told me, these days, she likes to shop in Corbin.

Laverta Boose: It used to be that you could walk on the street. “Oh, there go a nigger down the street.” You would hear this in Corbin, Kentucky, but now it seems to be much, much better. Now you can walk into a store, you can get a nice smile.

John Biewen: Still, some people in Corbin say their town has a lot of work to do in putting its hateful image to rest, starting with some straight talk about what really happened in 1919.

Laura Smith: You know, you were here 10 years ago, and I don’t think that you would recognize downtown if you came back …

John Biewen: Laura Smith, the Corbin native who told the story of her mother’s lie about where they lived … I checked in with her on the phone the other day, and she recorded herself. Laura is now 38. She lives in Egypt, Kentucky.
Egypt?

Laura Smith: Yes.

John Biewen: That’s awesome.

Laura Smith: Yeah, isn’t it a good place name?

John Biewen: Egypt is just 45 minutes from Corbin. Her parents still live there, and she’s in pretty close touch with what’s happening in Corbin.

Laura Smith: We have a farm to table restaurant downtown that features really great regional food as well as craft beers. We have a really great coffee shop …

John Biewen: Laura says with the coal economy’s decline, which affects the important railroad business in Corbin, the town has had other economic successes. A new farmer’s market led to other foodie businesses and the coffee shop, all owned by younger people who had lived elsewhere and came back home.

Laura Smith: And they tend to be pretty progressive, too, so when I walk into a downtown restaurant now, one of the surprising thing is that, one, it’s packed, and there’s actually people back downtown, which is great to see, and, two, it’s a lot of young people, and it’s very much a diverse crowd. People of color …

John Biewen: Laura doesn’t know of any meaningful change in the actual black population in Corbin. She thinks those diverse people she sees downtown are mostly just in for the day from the surrounding area.

Laura Smith: … college students, and then there’s also folks who are driving down from Lexington and places like that, or tourists who are staying in the area or on their way to other places, so I’m not sure …

John Biewen: But in the town known as the home of Colonel Sanders, you can now get a cup of fair trade coffee, and a local restaurant declared itself a sanctuary in the face of the Trump administration’s travel ban on Muslim countries. Corbin’s vibe is increasingly inclusive, as Laura puts it, which makes it all the more unfortunate, in her opinion, that the town still doesn’t acknowledge its troubled past. There’s still no public marker of any kind about what happened in 1919.
In 2007, the same year a version of my piece about Corbin aired on NPR, Laura and a young newspaper reporter in town organized a display about the racial expulsion at the public library. Showing some of the documents you heard about in this piece, the affidavits about the race riot.

Laura Smith: You know, court proceeding documents, clips from the local newspaper, and also some of the national newspapers that covered it, and those were put on display at the public library for anybody to view. There wasn’t like a public dialogue around it, but they were publicly presented.

John Biewen: Also in 2007, the Corbin city government organized a lecture series on the history of the town featuring a local historian. Laura went to those lectures, and was disappointed.

Laura Smith: You know, it kind of went from the founding and kind of early, early history of the town to jumping forward to the mid to late 1920s. So there was a sizeable gap of history that wasn’t talked about, including the year 1919.

John Biewen: Today, the city of Corbin’s website features a history page. It includes some colorful details about the town’s labor history. It even mentions some violence among railroad and timber workers in the late 19th century, but it says “gave the town a rough reputation at the time.” But about the expulsion of hundreds of black people in 1919, and the town’s image problems as a result of that? Nothing.

Laura Smith: As somebody who’s from a town where, you know, a significant race riot occurred, I think it’s incredibly important that we air that, and talk about it, and have constructive dialogue around it, and memorialize it in some way. And I think that while there are folks that would think that would be detrimental to the town, I actually think it would be incredibly beneficial for the town and the good efforts that are happening there for that to happen.

Nathan Connelly: Thanks to John Biewen and our friends at SceneOnRadio.org. That’s SceneOnRadio.org for that story of the racial expulsion at Corbin, Kentucky, in 1919.

The Extraordinary Korla Pandit

Producer Nina Earnest explores the story of John Roland Redd, an African-American organist who donned a bejeweled turban and rewrote his life story to become “Godfather of Exotica” Korla Pandit.

acting; cultural appropriation; cultural blending; exoticism

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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One of the most extraordinary stories we’ve covered on Back Story was the tale of a California celebrity known as the Godfather of Exotica, an organist named Korla Pandit. Pandit was a turban-wearing exotic who became famous in the 1940s and 50s for his dreamy, jazzy tones, which drew freely from the melodies of south Asia and African rhythms.
But as producer [Nina Ernest 00:26:57] discovered, the truth about Korla Pandit was even more complicated than it seemed.

Nina Ernest: Back in the early 1990s, journalist R.J. Smith and his music nerd friends … His words, not mine … Would travel around Los Angeles visiting its old tiki bars and cocktail lounges. Korla Pandit, wearing his trademark bejeweled turban, was often one of the performers.

R.J. Smith: We would pull into a nightclub or an old spot, and if they had a piano, or best of all, like a Hammond organ, there was Korla, and he would just play these amazing, exotic-sounding songs that evoked Asia, ancient Africa, Persian music not as it really exists or existed, but as those of us who had grown up on Hollywood movies thought it existed.

Nina Ernest: This is how the two men met. Smith says that the Godfather of Exotica was soft spoken and philosophical.

R.J. Smith: He also had this whole, long, ever changing kind of back story about how he was from India, born into a Brahman family, an elite, well-off family in India, and they sent him off, his family did, to the west to go to music school. Everybody knew that.

Nina Ernest: Not long after Pandit died in 1998, Smith was interviewing black bebop legend Sir Charles Thompson. Thompson was originally from the Midwest.

R.J. Smith: Out of the blue, he started talking about when he was a young man, he had heard a guy play that was the best piano player in the region he’d heard of, a real boogie-woogie player, and he never knew what happened to that guy. His name was John Redd. But then one day, after Sir Charles Thompson had moved to Los Angeles, and established his career, he was watching TV one day, and he saw this man with a faraway look in his eye and a turban on his head playing exotic sounds allegedly of the Far East, and he knew who that guy was. It was John Red who he had heard play as a young man, and that just blew my mind. I knew he was talking about Korla Pandit. John Redd was Korla Pandit.

Nina Ernest: Pandit wasn’t from India. He was actually African-American and from Missouri. John Roland Redd was born there in 1921, but in the 1930s, he and other family members began to move to Los Angeles. In L.A., Redd started looking for work as a musician. He was talented, an excellent piano player and organist. But southern California wasn’t all that welcoming. Opportunities for African-American musicians were still hard to come by, so Redd, who was light-skinned, began passing in his performances.

R.J. Smith: On one level, it’s simply an equation. There were two different musicians unions in southern California, a white one and a black one. Now, if you were in the black one, there were only certain places you were going to ever get gigs. Now, if you could pass yourself off somewhere in between white and black, your opportunities multiplied.

Nina Ernest: Redd first tried out a Latin-American alter ego named Juan Rolando, but by the late 1940s, he had adopted the Indian-born persona Korla Pandit, the identity he would maintain for the rest of his life.
The centerpiece of his costume was his turban. Redd was hardly the first African-American to take this approach. Some black men were known to wear turbans to get around mistreatment and segregation laws in the Jim Crow south. In 1944, Pandit had married white woman named Beryl DeBeeson. Some speculate that she helped him craft this character. And it worked. Pandit got his big break in what was then a new medium.

R.J. Smith: In southern California in the late 40s and early 50s, Korla Pandit was a TV star.

Speaker 20: A program based on the universal language of music, it is our pleasure to present to you Korla Pandit.

R.J. Smith: He would say nothing. He would just look into the camera, play the organ or the piano. It was sort of Liberace before Liberace even in a way.

Nina Ernest: Korla Pandit’s Adventures in Music first aired on L.A.’s KTLA in February 1949. The show, performed live, came on every weekday afternoon.

R.J. Smith: And he would just look out into the living rooms of southern California, and his eyes were intense and mesmerizing, and the music was intense and mesmerizing. And housewives all over southern California swooned.

Nina Ernest: Pandit’s silent appearance on the show wrapped him in mystery. What his viewers didn’t know was that they were watching one of the first African-Americans to have his own television show.
Pandit’s legend grew in the following decades as he told stories about his Indian upbringing. Take this appearance on a local talk show.

Korla Pandit: I was born in New Delhi. New Delhi, India. And started performing music in a sense at a very early age, two years and four months old.

Nina Ernest: He went on to have a long career, performing well into the 1990s. That’s when Smith met him around Los Angeles.
Smith says that once he learned that the enigmatic Pandit was actually African-American, he couldn’t stop thinking about it.

R.J. Smith: And that just told me if I’m fascinated by it and the people I’m talking to are maybe this is something worth writing about.

Nina Ernest: Not long after Pandit died in 1998, Smith published an article revealing Korla Pandit’s identity in Los Angeles Magazine. Smith wrote that Pandit’s children didn’t know the truth. In fact, his son and even his wife, Beryl, denied the story. Pandit’s surviving son could not be reached for comment.
By many accounts, the news shocked a lot of music fans, but it didn’t surprise the African-American family of John Roland Redd, many of whom lived in Los Angeles.

Adrienne H.: There was so much more to Korla than mainstream’s discovery of his cultural identity because it wasn’t a secret within the community that he came out of.

Nina Ernest: This is Korla Pandit’s great niece [Adrienne Hernandez 00:33:25]. She’s the granddaughter of one of John Redd’s sisters. Adrienne says she knew from an early age that her uncle was the Korla Pandit, but also Uncle John.
Since R.J. Smith’s article, Korla Pandit is now just as known for his racial passing as for his work as a music and television pioneer. But Adrienne says she doesn’t really think of her uncle as someone who passed.

Adrienne H.: One of the things that is often covered when we discuss concepts of identity passing in this country is the sentiment that everyone who does that is in a place of forsaking the traditions and culture that they come from. I just don’t think that our family experienced it that way because we had access to my uncle. There was never a feeling of, oh, we’ve lost him.

Nina Ernest: Pandit was a big part of her life. He often visited the family, and they attended his performances. Adrienne says many in their Los Angeles community knew he was the son of local pastor Ernest Redd. She saw the persona of Korla Pandit as more of a performance costume.

Adrienne H.: If my uncle fits into that category of passing is because American society needed him to have the look of Korla Pandit in order to fully receive the gift that he had to offer. You know, kind of the inside joke about Korla’s presentation was that the Hollywood story was that he was Hindu, and Hindus don’t wear turbans, and yet all of his audience was willing to receive him as a Hindu because that’s what they wanted him to be. They liked the turban, they liked the jewel.

Nina Ernest: Another of Pandit’s nieces, [Maya Hernandez 00:35:13], also grew up knowing her uncle. She and Adrienne are first cousins.
Maya says she’s proud of what John Redd accomplished in the guise of Korla Pandit.

Maya Hernandez: Bravo for him in some ways. You know, I don’t obviously feel comfortable with appropriating one culture for another, but I also think, too, he lived in a very oppressive time.

Nina Ernest: There was secrecy in Pandit’s life. From what we know, he didn’t tell his children about his racial background, but he was a part of his African-American family who viewed Pandit and Redd as one and the same.

Maya Hernandez: It was something, I think, in some ways was supported by the family, that any time any of his siblings could’ve outed him. There was opportunity there, but it was something that was supported because, I think, they saw the value in helping Korla be an individual, and loving him for who he was.

Nina Ernest: Some people have criticized R.J. Smith for being the one who outed Korla Pandit.

R.J. Smith: What was I outing him as? An African-American. Is that something to be ashamed of? I’m sure that Korla, son of an African-American leader in the community in Los Angeles, I’m pretty confident he was not ashamed of that. I’m pretty confident that why he put the turban on was not out of shame, or guilt, or not liking who he was. It was for who the rest of us were.

Nathan Connelly: Producer Nina Ernest uncovered the extraordinary story of Korla Pandit.

MLK: From Activist to Icon

How did Dr Martin Luther King Jr go from being the enemy of white America to an icon, almost universally admired today? In an extract from our BackStory Show The Real Martin Luther-King Brian speaks to scholars Jason Sokol, Jeanne Theoharis, Thomas Jackson and Clayborne Carson about King the Icon, and asks if we have forgotten just how radical Martin Luther King was.

Music:

Forecasting by Podington Bear

The Riddle Song by Podington Bear

Black radicalism; MLK; celebrity

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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In April 2018, Back Story marked the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., with a show which explored King’s real political views and assessed his legacy. One of the topics we addressed was the nature of King’s posthumous rehabilitation.
In 1966, a Gallup poll had found that King was viewed unfavorably by 63% of Americans. Today, of course, King is an American icon, and a 2011 poll found that 94% of Americans had a positive view of him. So, how did that happen? My colleague, Brian Balogh, talked to a number of King’s scholars.

Ronald Reagan: When I was thinking of the contributions to our country, the man that we’re honoring today, a passage attributed to the American poet John Greenleaf Whittier comes to mind. “Each crisis brings its word and deed.”
In America in the 50s and 60s, one of the important crises we faced was racial discrimination. A man whose words and deeds in that crisis stirred our nation to the very depths of its soul was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Brian Balogh: On November 2nd, 1983, President Ronald Reagan signed the Martin Luther King Day holiday into law. It was a holiday that Ronald Reagan had opposed for decades, but in a speech in the Rose Garden in front of members of Congress and members of Martin Luther King’s family, he praised King as a man who awakened something strong and true in the American people.

Ronald Reagan: 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.

Brian Balogh: The session ended with the guests bursting into an impromptu rendition of the civil rights anthem, We Shall Overcome. King had already appeared on a US postage stamp in 1979, but the national holiday in his name was a crucial step to establishing him as a national symbol.
Today, Martin Luther King is celebrated in children’s books, inspirational posters, and a monument in Washington DC within sight of the Lincoln Memorial, where King delivered his “I have a dream” speech.
A Gallup poll in 2011 found 94% of Americans have a positive view of Martin Luther King. In August 1966, a Gallup poll found that King was viewed unfavorably by 63% of Americans. So how did King make this journey from controversial civil rights leader to American icon?

Jason Sokol: The first point was the assassination itself, where the way King died positioned him to become a martyr.

Brian Balogh: Jason Sokol is the author of The Heavens Might Crack: The Death and Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Jason Sokol: The other thing is that King’s death itself accelerated the move toward radicalism and militancy among African-Americans, and that was something that was going on among young Americans in general. You know, the Weathermen gathered steam and momentum in 1969 and beyond, so a lot of the alternatives that were offered in ’68, ’69 and through the 70s were these more violent alternatives, and when King’s message was counterposed against those alternatives, he began to seem even more moderate.
And so I think a lot of white Americans could latch onto parts of King’s vision that they were comfortable with. For instance, every American today probably knows the line from the “I have a dream” speech where King talked about how he longed for the day when his children would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. Now, that’s a message that a lot of white Americans can embrace.
Later in the same speech, King talked about the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. He talked about the whirlwinds of revolt that would shake the nation if justice didn’t come soon. So I think there were parts of King’s career and life where he really did offer this vision of inter-racialism and color blindness, and I think, over the years once he was gone, it became easy for white Americans to embrace one part of his message, the inter-racialism and color blindness part, and conveniently forget about the parts that were more threatening. King’s challenge to American imperialism, King’s challenge to capitalism itself.

Brian Balogh: So has the creation of King the icon come at the expense of King the radical, political leader? Jeanne Theoharis.

Jeanne T.: I think we like a King who is easy. What we don’t tend to want is a King who challenges us, who shows us our complacencies, who calls us out for wanting easy change, wanting change that won’t cost us anything. I mean, I think we like an association with King, right? But we like that only as far as it makes us feel good about ourselves, and the minute it holds a mirror to our contemporary actions, it becomes less appealing.

Clayborne C.: He was safer dead than alive. For most Americans, he was more acceptable.

Brian Balogh: That’s Clayborne Carson, the director of the Martin Luther King Research and Education Institute at Stanford University.

Clayborne C.: You know, you could see it happening the moment he died. Look at who came to the funeral. People who would not have been seen next to him when he was alive, especially from the political world. They all wanted to be in the front seat at the funeral, and people who had known and followed Martin Luther King couldn’t even get in. There was already that beginning of the reinterpretation of Martin Luther King, that he was the great, heroic figure of American citizenship because that’s the part of him that had become part of the self-conception of the nation. The Civil Rights Act kind of took away that stain of the Jim Crow system, and so if you identified him with that, that was something that embarrassed the nation and the world, but what he was doing during the last three years of his life, of course, was quickly forgotten.

Brian Balogh: Tom, help me out here. Today, we go into schools and see pictures of Martin Luther King. He is so much a symbol of bringing the nation together, if you will. How did the King who was despised by so many at the time, how did the King who was portrayed as a Communist and a radical by the FBI, how did that King become domesticated?

Thomas Jackson: It’s a complicated process. It’s happening before the assassination. You can see King speaking differently to different audiences. He’s labeled a moderate militant by [Augie Meyer 00:45:05] in 1965 not because he was both at the same time, but because he spoke to different audiences based on his judgment of their values, what they were ready to hear, what it was safe for him to say.
It’s no surprise that in the dream speech he would appeal to the Christian and the American Nationalist ideals, and share this optimistic hope that one day his children would be judged on their character and not their color, but nor is it surprising that a month later, with 20,000 trade unionists in Madison Square Garden, that he would include a much more radical line from the standard dream speech. “I have a dream that my children would grow up in a nation where property and privilege are widely distributed, a nation which does not take necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes.”

Brian Balogh: King has become quite a hero of those who are identified on the right side of the political spectrum. Ronald Reagan and a number of neo-conservatives have embraced King as a symbol for America.

Thomas Jackson: Absolutely, and there are elements of symbolism and pieces of rhetoric that support a kind of conservative approach or a celebration of America as post-racial. My best example is when Reagan signed the holiday bill after years of debate, well, not only did he say “We won’t find until 2027 whether he was really a communist,” what he did was he went to black schools and lectured that “Martin Luther King believed that all of you should be judged by your character and not your color as individuals. His dream was the American dream. It’s a dream that made America great, and it has come to pass, and you now all have opportunity because of Dr. King. And had he lived, he would support my policies of Reaganomics because an unfettered marketplace is the best arena in which that kind of individual freedom can thrive. He would’ve opposed affirmative action because it’s not the state, it’s God that gives you your rights, and affirmative action is a violation of that sacred principle of individual liberty.”
You can quote King to support that, and he did, so that ideological contest … At the same time, there were marches on Washington that were bringing Reagan to task. Look at the photographs of the 1983 march that I attended, and they are all taking Reaganomics to task for violating King’s economic dream of a real war on poverty, of a guaranteed annual income, and of affirmative action that would uplift suppressed minorities.

Jeanne T.: I think if we listen to Dr. King, Dr. King is calling out systemic racism in the United States. There’s this beautiful quote that he writes at the end of his life where he’s talking about how black people took people on their word that equality means equality when many white people sort of take equality as just improvement, and are not committed to equality at all. That Dr. King would be very dismayed at the ways that he is now deployed in the service of inequality, in the service of standing in the way of movements for justice today.
We have Mike Huckabee calling on Ferguson protestors to be more like King, or we have then-Mayor Kasim Reed saying, “Dr. King would never take a highway,” which is a gross distortion of who King was and what he did.

Brian Balogh: But is it possible 50 years after his death to reconnect King the icon with King the radical, political leader? Clayborne Carson.

Clayborne C.: I think it is because you have a new generation coming up who are dealing with the problems left behind by the civil rights struggle. You know, that’s why I think the relevance of his last book, Where Do We Go From Here … He was writing that after the passage of civil rights legislation, so contemporary movements are basically making the same argument that he made back in 1967. They’re saying that these changes were important, but they didn’t deal with the fundamental problems in America. The fundamental problems was not this southern Jim Crow system. That was an important issue that needed to be taken care of, but once you’ve done that, it just makes the south like the rest of the nation, and it’s not like black people are thriving in the rest of the nation.
So I think that’s where we are now. We haven’t answered his question, where do we go from here?

Nathan Connelly: You heard the scholars Jason Sokol, Jeanne Theoharis, Thomas Jackson, and Clayborne Carson there discussing the legacy of Dr. King with our own Brian Balogh.
The segments you heard today and many more are in our archive at BackstoryRadio.org.
Funding from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation is helping Virginia Humanities and Backstory change the narrative of race and representation.
Backstory is produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Provost’s Office at the University of Virginia, the Johns Hopkins University, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation. Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment.

Speaker 30: Brian Balogh is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus at the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. Nathan Connelly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. Backstory was created by [Andrew Windham 00:51:47] for Virginia Humanities.