Martin Luther King press conference by Marion S. Trikosko, March 26, 1964. Source: Library of Congress

The Real Martin Luther King

Reflecting on MLK 50 Years After His Death

01.17.20

Had he lived, Martin Luther King, Jr. would have celebrated his 91^st birthday this week. King is celebrated as an American hero and championed in children’s books and inspirational posters, but have Americans lost sight of the real MLK?

MLK; Martin Luther King Day; civil rights movement; historical memory

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Segments

April 3, 1968

On April 3, 1968, Martin Luther King was in Memphis supporting the long-running Sanitation Workers’ Strike. Brian talks to scholars Michael Honey, Jeanne Theoharis and Thomas Jackson about King’s campaign for economic justice, and his controversial “Poor People’s Campaign.”

Music:

Crow by Podington Bear

Welcome by Jahzzar

MLK; Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike (1968); Poor People’s Campaign; civil rights movement; economic inequality; social justice

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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ED: Everyone knows Spotify is the place to go to stream the latest and greatest in music. But you can now also stream podcasts.

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BRIAN: Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Virginia, The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. From Virginia Humanities, this is BackStory.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

On the 3rd of April, 1968, one of the most controversial political leaders in American history flew into Memphis, Tennessee. He was there to offer his support to a strike, which had just entered its 52nd day. The Sanitation Workers’ Strike had become a source of bitter tension between black activists and city officials. It also marked a key stage in the development of Martin Luther King’s Poor People’s Campaign, intended to culminate with another march on Washington, DC.

MICHAEL HONEY: The work was very physical at the time. They’d ride on the back of these sanitation trucks. They’d go out in people’s yards, pick up tubs full of maggots and garbage, and carry it on their heads, take it to the back of a truck, and push it up to a higher level. And someone else would pick it up and throw it in a waste bin in the truck.

BRIAN: That’s Michael Honey, author of The Promised Land– Martin Luther King and the Fight for Economic Justice.

MICHAEL HONEY: The people who did this kind of work that I’m describing were all African American. There were about 1,300 of them. The supervisors were almost all white. The truck drivers were mostly white. I think some black. But the people who did the pick-up work and so forth were all black. And it was considered not something a white worker would ever do.

BRIAN: What did King say to these sanitation workers that night?

MICHAEL HONEY: There were a lot of painful things that had already happened. So two workers were killed in the back of a sanitation truck because of faulty equipment. The workers went on strike. When they held a demonstration downtown, the police attacked them with mace.

By the time King got there, it was six weeks into this, and the black ministers and churches had joined hands with the black workers. And it’s one of the few times in the South where you see white trade union people joining with black workers in a situation that’s as much about civil rights as it is about labor rights. People were also hungry and their families were going hungry. They didn’t have a strike fund.

So when King got there, the magic of King was his ability to take a local situation that was quite pragmatic and even mundane, and then amplifying that into a campaign for human rights, and explaining to the people in that situation the full meaning of what they were doing. And one of the phrases from that great speech is “all labor has dignity.” And he was able without notes, without really being briefed on the situation to just understand right away what this was all about, and put it in language that workers and the middle class, the preachers and the teachers and the students, would understand.

[MUSIC – JAHZZAR, “WELCOME”]

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Part of why we have this mistaken assumption that King only turns to economic justice in the last year of his life is in part because of the way that the media often covered Dr. King.

BRIAN: Jeanne Theoharis is the author of A More Beautiful and Terrible History– The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: I think we have to remember how relentlessly King is attacked for being a communist, how much sort of the federal government surveils the Kings in part because– and using the justification that he is potentially affiliated with communists.

And so I think we have to contextualize that reluctance in the climate that constantly questioned sort of King as a possible subversive, as a possible extremist, as a possible communist sympathizer. We can’t forget the climate and the ways that King’s push for racial justice, social justice is constantly being attacked and maligned as subversive, as potentially communist or anti-American.

THOMAS JACKSON: The Poor People’s Campaign was kind of go-for-broke strategy that King initiated namely in response to summer after summer of urban rioting and the election of a conservative Congress in 1966 that was pulling back on commitments to the war on poverty.

BRIAN: Thomas Jackson is the author of From Civil Rights to Human Rights– Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Struggle for Economic Justice.

THOMAS JACKSON: Well, the point was to bring about 3,000 poor people to Washington, DC, to camp to make their conditions visible and to engage in massive civil disobedience on a scale that it had not been engaged in before. By 1967, King sees that you really need to give poor people hope, and you need to galvanize a movement that would have as much of a shock impact as a major riot.

So he is talking about what he called dislocating the functions of a city, trying to shut, as they had in Birmingham, that was probably what he had most in mind, those days, seven days where business just came to a halt in Birmingham because of the mass protests and arrests. So that’s the scale of things. It’s very different from anything he had contemplated earlier.

BRIAN: Now we think of King today as really a unifying figure. Yet during the Poor People’s Campaign, a liberal newspaper like The New York Times called it a “formula for discord.” Can you give us a sense of the opposition to King’s Poor People’s Campaign?

THOMAS JACKSON: You can see it in a disinformation campaign coordinated by the FBI. You can see it in news editorials. You see it in a flood of panicked letters from ordinary Americans. King in February had enlisted the promise of Stokely Carmichael and the Washington, DC, Black United Front that they would support a nonviolent march. But prominent newspapers– as you suggest, New York Times, Washington Post– doubted that anything other than violence could occur.

The FBI put editorials in local newspapers. Here’s a quote. “Reverend King is more dangerous than Stokely Carmichael because of his nonviolent masquerade. He continues to talk nonviolence even as it erupts all around him.”

So if you look at these letters to Lyndon Johnson, in the Johnson Library one man from Kirtland, Ohio writes, “If you do nothing as in the past to stop the King, then you may as well set the torch to Washington, DC, yourself. Please stop them before it’s too late.” A woman writes from Temple, Texas, quote, “Just pouring millions of our tax money into projects to help the Negroes won’t prevent their rioting since the cause is not poverty of the Negro but communist plans to weaken, divide, and destroy our country.”

King’s PhD dissertation advisor picks up on this, L. Howard DeWolf, and he writes, “Dr. King, nonviolent protests would probably lead to disorder and lawlessness, and possibly a fascist-type revolution under military leaders which might put the country under the direct rule of the military industrial complex, ending civil liberties and civil rights and precipitating World War III.” This is one of his lifetime liberal supporters picking up on a kind of panic. The great irony is that it was not the Poor People’s march that fomented riots. It was the King assassination.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

April 4, 1968

Ed and Joanne tell the story of the day of King’s death.

Music:

The Wrong Way by Jahzzar

MLK; Memphis; assassination of MLK; civil rights movement

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Hate is a dangerous force, and it is an injurious force, because it engines the object of hate as well as the subject of hate. It injures the hater as well as the hated. And it’s very interesting that many of the psychiatrists are saying to us now that the strange things that happen in the subconscience and many of the inner conflicts are rooted in hate. And this is why many are saying, love a parish.

FEMALE SPEAKER: Today on BackStory, the legacy of Martin Luther King on the 50th anniversary of his death.

MALE SPEAKER: King spent most of April 4, 1968, resting. Though he did not know it, the plane which had carried King from Atlanta to Memphis had been subject to a bomb threat which came in the form of a phone call to Eastern Airlines. At 5 o’clock that day, King began gathering the staff of his Southern Christian Leadership Conference to visit the home of the Reverend Billy Kyles.

FEMALE SPEAKER: Unbeknownst to King and his staff, a drifter had checked into a flophouse across the road under the false name of Eric Gault. James Earl Ray had bought a .30-06 Remington Gamemaster rifle while passing through Birmingham, Alabama, and a pair of Bushnell binoculars in Memphis. He was watching everyone who arrived and left King’s hotel room, room number 306.

MALE SPEAKER: By all accounts, King was in a good mood that afternoon. He’d come out on the balcony to say hello to saxophonist Ben Branch. King said, “Ben, make sure you play “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” in the meeting tonight. Play it real pretty.” Branch replied, OK, Doc. I will. Then James Earl Ray fired.

[MUSIC – PODINGTON BEAR, “CROW”]

D.C. is Burning

In the aftermath of Martin Luther King’s assassination, riots broke out across the U.S. Nathan speaks to Samuel Walker, author of “Most of 14th Street is Gone: The Washington, DC Riots of 1968.”

Music:

Dunes by Podington Bear

MLK; Washington D.C.; assassination of MLK; civil rights movement; urban riots

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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NATHAN: News of King’s shooting sent shock waves across the country. Riots broke out all across the nation in cities like Detroit, Pittsburgh, Kansas City, Baltimore, and Chicago. But no city faced as much violence and upheaval as the capital, Washington, DC. Images of troops guarding the White House with machine guns while plumes of smoke snaked into the sky were beamed across America and the world.

And how to deal with the riots proved to be a leadership challenge for both President Lyndon B. Johnson and the city’s first black mayor, Walter Washington. Historian Samuel Walker says the tragic news reached the capital shortly after 7:00 PM.

SAMUEL WALKER: People began to gather at 14th and U Street, which was kind of the epicenter of black Washington, and a major commercial area for black Washington. And the crowd was sad, it was concerned, and it was in shock. Shortly after, word came through that King had died from his wounds. It wasn’t too long after that that the rioting began as a way of venting frustration and anger and resentment.

NATHAN: Now when the riots erupt in April of 1968 in Washington, DC, they ended up being really dramatic in terms of their consequences. You have 13 people killed, thousands injured, some 8,000 people arrested. And what were the conditions in America’s urban communities that seemed to make the King assassination just the natural explosive element?

SAMUEL WALKER: Yeah. Poverty, deprivation, poor schools, soaring crime rates, joblessness, high unemployment. And perhaps most discouraging, limited opportunities. So it was a conversion of conditions.

Once the word came through that King had died, they were angry, and there’s a sense of helplessness. And a way to deal with that was to start looting. There was some arson, or at least some fires being set. And the police were outnumbered, so things were out of control for several hours.

But then it calmed down and people went home. There was a brief rainstorm, and that helped. And there was a concern that things would break out again. The assumption was based on the experiences from previous rioting that if things broke out again, it wouldn’t be until after dark on Friday.

NATHAN: Did that happen? Was there another flare-up after the first day had subsided?

SAMUEL WALKER: Things got really bad on Friday, and that’s when things really went out of control. There was more looting of stores. Stores that hadn’t been attacked on Thursday were cleaned out on Friday.

And one of the major stores there was Morton’s Department Store that served people of that community. And on Friday afternoon after things got bad on H Street, looters went in. Pretty much cleaned out the store of its merchandise.

And once everyone had left, or at least they thought most everyone had left, a guy who’d been watching what was going on, watching the looters come out of Morton’s Department Store stepped up and threw a firebomb into one of the open doors or open windows of the store. And within a very short time, it was up in flames and burned to the ground. What we found out later was that there was at least one teenager in there who didn’t get out in time and who was burned beyond recognition.

NATHAN: Now as the riot is spreading, at some point you literally have plumes of smoke in the wake of the Capitol building, right? I mean, it gets to the point where you can see the center of government, national government, and the riot literally juxtaposed in the same shots.

SAMUEL WALKER: Yeah, that’s exactly right. When the Capitol Dome was lighted, the lighted dome was largely obscured by the smoke that was rising from the city, depending on where you were. But President Johnson said he looked out the window at the White House, and all he could see was smoke. And he said, what must people be thinking about what’s going on?

NATHAN: What’s Johnson’s sense of how to remedy this problem?

SAMUEL WALKER: Johnson didn’t know. Johnson was torn between, on the one hand– and he clearly recognized that the rioters had legitimate grievances, but he also was outraged that they were using violence to try to redress their grievances. By Friday afternoon, early afternoon, once the rioting resumed, Mayor Washington was saying, Mr. President, you know, you have to call out the troops, even if we use the National Guard.

The National Guard in Washington was only 2,000 strong. The police force was maybe 3,000 strong. And that was not enough. Those numbers were not enough in themselves to contain what was going on. So he was saying, we need troops.

But Johnson did not want to call out troops, because he was afraid that, you know, I don’t want to call out troops and have them shooting women and children. And he finally only called out troops after he sent out three of his advisors, and they quickly concluded that the police could not possibly restore order. That was his first step toward restoring order.

NATHAN: How would you describe the long-term impact of the riots that erupted in the wake of King’s assassination? I mean, describe them on the scale of Washington, DC, but also in terms of the country and the way that the country’s sentiment might have changed after seeing DC in flames.

SAMUEL WALKER: The impact on the riot areas in Washington was enormous, especially Upper 7th Street. 14th Street, the whole run from U street up for 20 or more blocks and 8th Street were pretty much burned out areas, very depressed areas until the early 1990s. So a quarter of a century.

The impact in terms of the country is interesting, and rather hard to figure out, because we haven’t had major riots or many major riots since 1968. Los Angeles, 1992 and Baltimore a couple of years ago are exceptions, but they are exceptions.

And scholars and journalists and others have tried to figure out why that is, and the bottom line that everyone has come up with is that we don’t know why there haven’t been more rights. It’s not as though conditions have improved. Conditions in the struggling areas of most cities, including Washington, are no better than they were in 1968, and in some ways, worse. One reason that I wrote the book was to kind of heed the lessons of history. I think there’s reason for concern that we could see it happen again.

NATHAN: Sam Walker is the author of Most of 14th Street is Gone– The Washington, DC, Riots of 1968.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Mrs King, Keeper of the Flame

After Dr King’s death, Coretta Scott King, his widow, became the custodian of his reputation. Nathan speaks to Dr. Barbara Reynolds, Mrs. King’s longtime friend and co-author of her life story.

MLK; civil rights movement; hero worship; historical memory; reputation

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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FEMALE SPEAKER: After Martin Luther King’s death, his widow, Coretta Scott King, set about preserving and shaping his reputation. She set up and directed the King Center in Atlanta, and pushed tirelessly for the creation of a Martin Luther King Day holiday.

NATHAN: The journalist Dr. Barbara Reynolds was Coretta Scott King’s longtime friend and co-author of her life story, My Life, My Love, My Legacy. I asked Dr. Reynolds how she first met Coretta Scott King.

BARBARA REYNOLDS: Well, let’s go back to about 1972. The Chicago Tribune assigned me to do a cover story about her. And at that point, Coretta Scott King was like the first lady of civil rights. And I was a young reporter, so you have to imagine how that made me feel. I mean, to go and talk to Coretta Scott King. And she was in the basement of a church where she showed me the plans for the King Center.

NATHAN: Now at the end of King’s life, he had fallen greatly out of favor among many Americans. He was deeply unpopular, in part because of his views about the war. Certainly he hadn’t stopped pushing for various forms of racial justice. How much did she get concerned about what his reputation had been in legacy terms?

BARBARA REYNOLDS: Well, first of all, you have to understand that she was the builder. She was the architect of his legacy. Because when he was assassinated, she was one of a few people that wanted and made it her sole business to institutionalize his legacy, which was nonviolence. At the Center, for example, they taught nonviolence to thousands. Nonviolence was not just something that they said. It really was a program.

But also in the Center, she did one step more. And this is very important. She set up the apparatus for the King holiday. It’s now celebrated in at least 100 countries. And that, you know, it disturbed me at the time when people would say, you know, she is important to the King holiday. But in the King holiday when we’re all celebrating it, we often don’t even mention her name.

But she had 76 coalitions that she formed to get this going. She lobbied every senator in Congress to get this going. She organized five million signatures to get this established. And so this was not just something you should flick off and say, you know, she helped. No, she helped organize. It took her 15 years of her life to do that. And I think without a holiday, I think maybe he might have been forgotten, and he would not be larger than life, as he is now.

NATHAN: Now somewhat infamously, Coretta Scott King was not allowed to speak at the August 1963 March on Washington, nor were any women allowed to speak at that high watermark really in the forms of direct action in the civil rights struggle. Did she talk at all with you about what it felt like to be kept–

[LAUGHTER]

Please, by all means.

BARBARA REYNOLDS: You know, she didn’t get personally rattled and upset about a lot of things. But think about this march. Because Rosa Parks couldn’t even speak.

NATHAN: Right.

[LAUGH]

BARBARA REYNOLDS: Now I mean, you know, this is why this happened, because this brave lady, activist, NAACP secretary, she refused to move to the back of the bus. And that brought Dr. King and all the rest of it. She couldn’t even speak. You know, she had four children, so she couldn’t march always, but she had marched with some of the great campaigns with Martin.

And so when she was reading his speech and talking about, maybe you ought to add this, and he gave this speech, and it electrified the nation, after the speech, they got in the limousine, and they were headed over to the White House to meet with John Kennedy. But they got up to the White House door and they told the driver, we’ll send the ladies back to the hotel.

And she said, but Martin, I want to go see the president. And he says, this is not on the agenda. And she was very upset. And she went back to the hotel– oh, she was very upset, because she said, you know, John F. Kennedy had been so supportive in getting Martin out of jail. He had made a call to her, and she wanted to thank him personally. And of course, a couple months later, he died. And she said, I’m so sorry, because I never got to see him.

But you have to realize how sexist the black Baptist preachers were. Even when she was trying to build the King Center, so often they criticized her. And the same men who supported her husband didn’t want to support her. So I mean, sexism is not just something we see today. It was really alive and well among the movement people.

NATHAN: Now we’re coming up on the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s death. And much of what Coretta Scott King did over the time after her husband’s passing, as you point out, has not really been fully appreciated. But what would you say were some of the best examples of Coretta Scott King’s political vision, her stick-to-itiveness her wherewithal in the decades that were left after her husband had passed away?

BARBARA REYNOLDS: Well, you have to understand, as she was like a political queen maker. I saw what happens when you really have influence inside politics, because more monies were funded to black colleges, more poverty programs were made so that people of all color who needed help could get help. You know, I haven’t seen that kind of influence myself since.

NATHAN: I’m really curious to know about this process of coauthoring this book with Coretta Scott King. She was looking at the full sweep of her life, thinking I’m sure about what the book would mean for future generations. What was that process like, and what did she imagine and hope would come of her own life history?

BARBARA REYNOLDS: When I was at the Center where her crypt is beside Dr. Martin Luther King, her husband’s crypt, I saw an eternal flame, and I became fixated at that. And it was because it was something she had told me in the book.

She said, I want people to know that I was committed to leaving an eternal flame built on love that would never be extinguished. I wanted this flame to touch lives, communities, and nations. I wanted it to ignite and inspire. I wanted it to be an urgent call to community and public service.

And she talked about it. She said, every heartbreak I ever had preceded a breakthrough. Every thorn that pierced me positioned me for the next level of challenges. My story is a freedom song from within my soul. It is a story of struggle. And when it is time for me to end this journey, I will count it all joy.

MLK: From Activist to Icon

Brian speaks to 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

Black radicalism; MLK; civil rights movement; historical memory; radicalism

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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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. The man whose words and deeds in that crisis stirred our nation to the very depths of its sold was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

BRIAN: On November 2, 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: 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: First point was the assassination itself, where the way King died positioned him to become a martyr.

BRIAN: 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 on to 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, you know, there were parts of King’s career and life where he really did offer this vision of interracialism and colorblindness. And I think over the years once he was gone, it became easy for white Americans to embrace one part of his message, the interracialism and colorblindness part, and conveniently forget about the parts that were more threatening. You know, King’s challenge to American imperialism, King’s challenge to capitalism itself.

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

JEANNE THEOHARIS: 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 CARSON: He was safer dead than alive. You know, for most Americans, he was more acceptable.

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

CLAYBORNE CARSON: 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. You know, 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, you know? 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, you know? But what he was doing during the last three years of his life, of course, was quickly forgotten.

BRIAN: 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 Auggie Meier 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, but 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: 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 neoconservatives has 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, you know, we won’t find until 2027 whether he was really a communist.

What he did is 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 have 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 were 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 THEOHARIS: 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 white 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. You know, we have Mike Huckabee calling on Ferguson protesters 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: But is it possible 50 years after his death to reconnect King the icon with King the radical political leader? Clayborne Carson.

CLAYBORNE CARSON: 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?, you know 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.

You know, 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?

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Reflecting on MLK

The hosts recall their memories of the death of Martin Luther King.

MLK; assassination of MLK; personal memory

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BRIAN: Well, I think it’s worth starting by recalling some of our own memories of Martin Luther King’s assassination. I’m embarrassed to say that I have no specific memory of that day. And what makes it more embarrassing is that I remember distinctly when Robert Kennedy was assassinated. I remember distinctly when John F. Kennedy was assassinated back in 1963. I have no specific memories. Ed, do you have something authentic from the moment?

ED: Well, to the extent that anything that we see through television is authentic, right? Because the memory that I have before is, frankly, my dad railing at the TV whenever Martin Luther King would come on, and about just what a misguided, self-indulgent figure that he was, and that nothing good is going to come from all this.

And then frankly, the shame of the assassination when we realized it was in Tennessee. You know, that it was our own state who had killed this– and then suddenly a little bit of shame, the things that had been said around the television set, you know?

There was a clear sense after this. You could feel the ground shift of, like, oh, kind of a microcosm of what the country went through a little bit later. But you know– and I think a certain sense too that, wow. After King is gone and there’s still all the anger but there’s not this one person that we can talk about and focus on, it just– it suddenly felt like things were sort of chaotic.

BRIAN: Confusing.

ED: Yeah. And then when Robert Kennedy was assassinated a few months later, it just felt like the whole country is falling apart, is the feeling I had as a 15-year-old.

BRIAN: Joanne.

JOANNE: I have a memory of the year after the assassination, being in school and singing songs about Martin Luther King, and not really knowing who he was, but knowing he was a hero who somehow or other died to make things better.

ED: What grade were you in, Joanne?

JOANNE: Second grade.

NATHAN: Wow.

JOANNE: So that is my vague memory that somehow or other– because the songs were like, you know, sort of solemn but that he was a great hero, and somehow or other that he had died to make things better.

Now I have stronger memories about Robert Kennedy’s assassination, because what I remember in that case was my mother crying. And that’s all I remember. But I remember that because that was not something I think I’d ever seen before. And it’s interesting. Those are such different memories. I have a memory of crying associated with Robert Kennedy and a memory of singing associated with the death of Martin Luther King.

BRIAN: Well, Nathan, were you even born in 1968?

NATHAN: No, no. But I actually find it really striking that there’s a way in which as just a young person, King has kind of left his mark on all of us. I mean– or the absence of that mark causes us to feel a particular way. I mean, that to me, I think, really deserves some attention.

Because as a young person, you know, I really did enter kind of late middle school, high school, you know, in the 1990s. By that point, the Martin Luther King Day celebration had been almost– probably a decade in the making.

And it was one of those things that felt very easy as a young person, especially a young black person, to just kind of accept King as a hero. I mean, he was served up to us on a silver platter every January for King Day, every February for Black History Month. You know. And any time you saw documentaries about eyes on the prize, you know, that came during the summer [INAUDIBLE], that too was another way of really making him iconic.

But I also remember really stepping back from associating with King, because it felt as if he was just a two-dimensional figure that kind of loved everybody and didn’t really have a complicated ideology. That’s how he was presented to us as young people, you know? And so it was only when I read more, in fact, that I began to really appreciate him and the depth of his thinking, and really the sophisticated nature that he tried to think through some of the complicated questions about segregation, about the military, about poverty.

And you know, it’s, I think, really important that we remember just how much our current young folks are adopting a vision of King or a version of King that can be sometimes really flat. And I think it’s really incumbent on us to try as best we can to, you know, obviously complicate that, but then also to maybe widen the way that we think about King in history, to think about all the people who were supporting him and all the broader cast of characters that came out of that period.

I mean, there’s always a danger of associating just one movement with one person. He’s the only American that has his own holiday. We have a Columbus Day, we have a Martin Luther King Day, and then that’s pretty much it. We bundle together President’s Day for a couple people. And so I think there’s always a question about, how much do we put on this one person to do emotional work for us, you know?

ED: Well, I think there are other elements on this that are, as they say, counterintuitive. I want to try out an idea on you folks and see what you think. I believe that Martin Luther King may have done more for the economic growth of the American South of black and white, which as we now know has, for the first time in American history, black people moving to the South for the first time.

I think King throwing off the burden of segregation freed the South to become an international player economically with all the car companies that are building factories there now and all the corporate headquarters, and the way the South is booming. I think as long as the South labored under segregation, it was never going to do that.

So what would you say to that? That was the– it freed an entire region of the nation to participate in the global economy in ways that it had never been able to do before?

NATHAN: That’s a heavy point. So I think a couple of things. The first is that the South, you know, especially in urban areas like Atlanta, like New Orleans, like Miami, there was an earlier effort to try to remove the stain of segregation. People were trying to keep the Klan from being able to burn crosses in public or outlawing hoods, like, through the 1940s and ’50s.

But you’re absolutely right that there was a way in which King brought some attention that forced politicians at the state level who oftentimes were opposed to these more urban growth initiatives to really step in line and think about the economic future of the South. I mean, it’s hard to make a moral argument that segregation is justified in light of the very dramatic stands that he and many others took in front of cameras, in front of police through the 1960s. So that’s a critical piece of it.

But there again, it’s funny because I think King was still widely unpopular even in the South, right? There were conservative business elements, you know, among African Americans, among whites who just didn’t like the direct action moment.

And so it’s funny, because boycotts don’t grow the economy, you know? Bad press don’t grow the economy. And so there was a weird kind of a symbiont, I guess, relationship between the protests that helped to force people to reform, but then also the fact that you had to deal with a temporary lag in one’s reputation or in one’s, you know, appeal to northern money in light of the fact that these challenges were being made so publicly.

ED: Yeah. And I think that’s right. And you think about Atlanta being the primary beneficiary of this, being most closely associated with King. And you know, the city too busy to hate, and so forth. I remember going to the Atlanta Olympics in 1996 and seeing elaborate displays about Martin Luther King at– I think a picture of this at the stadium during, you know, the celebrations at the outset.

And it was like, but why are you celebrating him? What did he actually do? Well, you can’t say because you would have to admit that this place where we’re sitting had been based on segregation for a century before that, on slavery before that.

So he was so taken out of context, it’s kind of like, you know, Joanne’s experience as a second grader that we can celebrate him without actually talking about the evil that he overcame. And I just remember feeling like a very grumpy historian while other people are, you know, sort of misty-eyed about this and kind of going, yeah, but nobody around the world would have any idea of what he actually did, because we can’t name the evil.

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JOANNE: Michael Honey is the author of To the Promised Land: Martin Luther King and the Fight for Economic Justice. Jason Sokol is the author of The Heavens Might Crack: The Death and Legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. Clayborne Carson is the author of Martin’s Dream: My Journey and the Legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.

Jeanne Theoharis is the author of A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History. Thomas Jackson is the author of From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Struggle for Economic Justice.

BRIAN: The audio of Martin Luther King comes from the Studs Terkel Radio Archive.

NATHAN: That’s going to do it for us today, but you can keep this conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode or ask us your questions about history. You’ll find us at backstoryradio.org. Or send an email to backstory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter @BackStoryRadio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

JOANNE: This episode of BackStory was produced by David Stenhouse, Nina Earnest, Emily Gadek, and Ramona Martinez. Jamal Millner is our Technical Director, Diana Williams is our Digital Editor, and Joey Thompson is our Researcher.

Additional help came from Angeli Bishosh, Sequoia Carrillo, Corean Thomas, Courtney Spania, and Aaron Teiling. Our theme song was written by Nick Thorburn. Other music in this episode came from Ketsa, Podington Bear, and Jahzzar. Thanks to the Johns Hopkins studios in Baltimore.

NATHAN: BackStory is produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Provost Office at the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

ED: Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment.

MALE SPEAKER: Brian Balogh is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus of the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. BackStory was created by Andrew Windham for Virginia Humanities.

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