In our mythological retelling of the Civil Rights movement, Martin Luther King, Jr. vanquished the racist apartheid system of Jim Crow in the American South. However, in her groundbreaking new book, historian Jeanne Theoharis argues that King’s time in Boston, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago—outside Dixie—was at the heart of his campaign for racial justice. As the book description lays out, “King of the North follows King as he crisscrosses the country from the Northeast to the West Coast, challenging school segregation, police brutality, housing segregation, and job discrimination. For these efforts, he was relentlessly attacked by white liberals, the media, and the federal government.” In this episode of The Marc Steiner Show, Marc speaks with Professor Theoharis about the MLK Americans have deliberately forgotten, and what this recovered history tells us about how to fight against injustice today.
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Marc Steiner:
Welcome to the Marc Steiner Show here in The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s great to have you all with us. My guest today is Jean Theo Harris. She’s one of the most important and leading chronicler of the Civil Rights Movement and black power movements in our country. Our most recent book is King of the North, Martin Luther King’s Life of Struggle Outside the South. Dr. Theo Harris is a distinguished professor of political science and history at Brooklyn College and Cooney graduate school in New York, an author or co-author of 13 books and numerous articles on civil rights and black power movements and the Contemporary Politics of Race in America. And I also have to mention her amazing New York Times bestselling biography, the rebellious life of Mrs. Rosa Parks. There’s so much more to say, but if we kept up, we’d never talk to her. We’re about to have a conversation with author filmmaker Acts professor Jean Theo Harris. And so Jean, welcome. Good to have you with us. It’s been a long time. I’m glad you’re back here.
Jeanne Theoharis :
I’m glad to be back.
Marc Steiner:
So as always, we’re pumping on all cylinders. It must be something genetic in the family, but it’s great. So let me talk about the most recent book that we just mentioned about your idea of the sanitized Martin Luther King, what that means and well, let’s just start there.
Jeanne Theoharis :
I think part of the ways that we’ve sanitized King is that we’ve ized him. We’ve trapped him in the South. We’ve trapped non-violence in terms of lunch counter sit-ins and bus boycotts.
We have made him into some sort of respectability politics, kind of scolding minister, and all of these are deeply narrow and deeply inaccurate to who he was. So I think the first thing we want to remember is that Martin Luther King grows up in Atlanta, but he spends his formative coming of age years in grad school, but first in Pennsylvania at Crosier Seminary and then at Boston University getting his PhD, as does Coretta Scott. She goes to Antioch College for college, and then she goes to the New England Conservatory of Music. So fundamentally, both kings have experienced both that segregation is not a southern problem, but a national cancer. And they’ve also experienced the limits of northern liberalism at home, and they will never not know that. And so we often start the story of King in Montgomery, which is where he has his first pastorship and the Montgomery Bus boycott. But he comes into that experience with those lessons learned in Pennsylvania and Boston. Just to give you an example, when he moves to Boston, he tries to rent a place and no one will rent to him because he’s black. To give you another example, Coretta Scott goes to Antioch College in Ohio, probably the most liberal college in the nation.
Marc Steiner:
Absolutely.
Jeanne Theoharis :
Her and her sister are the first black students to go there in decades. She majors in music and elementary ed, and then all education majors, she asked Student Teach, but Antioch is located in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and Yellow Springs School Board says, no, we’re not having any black people. Student teach here. And Antioch goes along with them and she’s dumbfounded and her and her classmates are protesting the Korean War and they’re protesting all sorts of issues, and she tries to get those classmates to protest with her this policy and no one will. So she goes to the president of Antioch alone and basically protests and what they want her to do is to go student teach in a black town called Xenia, and she says, no, I am not paying for that. This is not American democracy. And I could go on with other stories. The point is that both of them have had these experiences that are going to forever shape how they see what the racial landscape of the United States is, not just the deep South and where they see the struggle is, which is again, coast to coast.
Marc Steiner:
Yeah, it’s interesting what you said is really important. People don’t realize that in that period, much of the north or the middle of the north, Ohio, Pennsylvania, where I grew up here in Baltimore, Maryland was segregated, separated
Jeanne Theoharis :
For sure.
Marc Steiner:
It wasn’t just Mississippi and Alabama.
Jeanne Theoharis :
Nope.
Marc Steiner:
And people do not realize that.
Jeanne Theoharis :
And the state or everyone from the mayor to the board of Ed to the governor is playing a role in that. It’s not just accidental or episodic segregation in New York, it’s the Board of Ed zoning schools so that some schools are almost all black and some schools are almost all white. And when those schools get overcrowded, whether it’s in New York or Chicago or la, do you know what those board of Eds do? They don’t rezone to move those black students into white schools. They go to double session days, they add trailer classrooms, they get deeply overcrowded. So I think another myth of the time is that somehow it was state sponsored in the South and more episodic or accidental or the result of personal prejudice, not sort of state action. And that’s also not
Marc Steiner:
True. Right, right. The personal prejudice. No, it’s not racism, just personal prejudice. Right. Well, I could digress into this and stay here for a long time, but let me answer this question. As someone who’s been in the media for a while and also been through the Civil Rights Movement, one of the things I think people do not get or even understand is the hostility in the way the media portrayed King and went after him, including great liberal institutions like the New York Times and more to talk a bit about that part of the world.
Jeanne Theoharis :
Yeah, I mean, I think that point is really important, and I think there’s been a tendency because the national media came to cover the Southern movement, and again, I’m talking about the Birmingham with sort of rigor and clarity that we then not scrutinized how they’re covering King, how they’re covering injustice closer to home in many ways. Part of the story I’m telling in King of the North required getting underneath a set of media narratives. The first was that segregation was sort of state sponsored in the South and not in the north. The second was that therefore the real problem of racism was in the South. The third then was southern black people were good and went for nonviolence and northern black people. And this set of media narratives, flattered, we could say northern sensibilities, and it produced wildly different coverage. If we look at how, for instance, the New York Times is covering Birmingham in 1963 versus how they cover as we were just talking about the New York City School boycott sort of the next year
And how they cover King and the kinds of criticisms that King is making of New York segregation or la. And so they tend to do a couple of things. One, for as long as they can, they minimize it. They call it alleged segregation. And they constantly use words like that in headlines. Activists alleged king alleges in ways that they don’t in the South, they tend to, as we talked about just using the New York City School boycott example, paint activists as reckless and unreasonable as hurting their own cause. In ways when we’re talking about activism, whether it’s in New York or Chicago or la and I should say when I’m using the word north, I’m using it the way King is using it and the way activists at the time are using it, and it basically means any place that thinks it’s not the South. So we’re talking the Northeast,
The Midwest, the West, and they obviously are very different in a lot of ways, but they also all take pride in, oh, we’re not the South. We don’t have that kind of racism. We’re open and tolerant. And so one of the things that I for the book is I looked at hundreds of articles from the LA Times, from the Chicago Tribune, from the Washington Post and from the New York Times to look at how they covered movements closer to home versus movements like the movement in Birmingham or what happens in Selma around voting rights versus what happens in Chicago versus what happens in la. And there was incredible discrepancy. Also, I should say the related to the myth about sort of southern black people go for non-violence and northern black people. So then the extension of that becomes after that you don’t have very much coverage of northern movements before the uprisings that happened in Harlem in 1964 and Watts, then the media discovers the problem in the north,
But in doing so, also paints northern black people as not going for nonviolence. Even though in LA in New York, there are years of movements basically calling out these issues. And that one of the things King will say over and over, I mean he will say about Watts, if you had listened, there would not have been a Watts. We have King stands with all these movements in LA in 62 and 63 and 64 against police brutality against school and housing segregation there. And then lo and behold, the LA Times is so surprised, how could we have this uprising? And King is basically calling the city to account. And it’s interesting. Then we have the mayor of LA who months earlier had given key to the city being like, you should never have come. You’re terrible when he’s talking about what needs to be happening in la. If the mayor could just stand next to King and be like, you’re great. You got a Nobel Prize, don’t talk about here. Then it’s like, we’re going to give you the key to the city. You’re always welcome. Except no, now you’re not welcome at all. And I’m being a little sassy, but that’s,
Marc Steiner:
That’s fine.
Jeanne Theoharis :
That’s the way that, so in many ways, we often talk about, and scholars like me talk about the ways that the king holiday is misused and king is stripped, but in fact, people are misusing king when he’s alive. They want to take pictures with him, but the minute he opens his mouth about their own problems, then they’re like, oh, be quiet. And the media helps to cement that narrative.
Marc Steiner:
I was thinking about what you just said a little bit ago and what you wrote about as well, about Coretta King.
Jeanne Theoharis :
Yeah,
Marc Steiner:
Because I think before we dive into other parts, I really think it’s important for people to understand who she really was
Jeanne Theoharis :
Absolutely.
Marc Steiner:
And how she was the radical not king, and how she dragged King into the radical world. I mean, let’s celebrate her for just a second.
Jeanne Theoharis :
As we were just talking about, she goes to Antioch College, gets politically involved at Antioch College, including with the Progressive Party. And people may remember the Progressive Party is a third party that gets started and they’re running a third party candidate, Henry Wallace for president in 1948, domestically on a kind of anti segregation platform, but also a kind of anti cold war. The progressive Party is bringing kind of a double challenge.
Marc Steiner:
This is 1948, as you said, it’s really important.
Jeanne Theoharis :
1948.
Marc Steiner:
48, right, right.
Jeanne Theoharis :
And she is supporting Henry Wallace for President 1948, and she is one of about 150 black people who go to the Progressive Party convention in Philadelphia. It is through her progressive party activism and work that she meets Bayard Rustin and Paul Robeson.
So I would like to say this very clearly, Coretta Scott King meets Paul Robeson meets Bayard Rustin long before Martin Luther King does, and long before she meets Martin Luther King. So she goes to Antioch and then she goes to New England Conservatory of Music for vocal education. And through a friend she meets Martin Luther King. And at first she’s very, she’s not sure she even is interested in a date. Most of the ministers she knows, and this is her words, are kind of about suits and sanctimony. They don’t have the kind of vision of Christian social responsibility. I mean, make no mistake, Coretta Scott King is a deep Christian, but for her, Christianity is how you live your life and the ways you practice that in the world. But she agrees to a date. And Martin Luther King, who is again getting his PhD at BU is smitten after that first date.
Right? He’s never met someone like her. They talk about racism and capitalism on their first date. Right? Good first date is at the end of the day, he says, you have everything I want in wife. Right? You’re beautiful, you’re smart, you’re thoughtful. And she’s like, you don’t even know me. So one of the things is that she is going to expand and kind of take many of the things that he is thinking and feeling and help those to grow. Many people talk about King going to be you, and that the influence that Howard Thurman absolutely has on king’s kind of growing, we might call liberation,
Marc Steiner:
Who’s a great radical black philosopher, if you will. Right, exactly.
Jeanne Theoharis :
He studies, and this is one of King’s mentors at BU and helps King find a kind of liberation theology, a black liberation theology, black social gospel, because we want to remember that King growing up didn’t think he wanted to be a minister because he found his father’s ministry both too emotional and too otherworldly, too materialistic, not in this world. And it is through his mentors at Morehouse and also his mentors at Crosier and bu. And again, Howard Thurman plays a big role in this that he begins to see this possibility for a ministry grounded in social justice. But another person who makes that vision a reality is Coretta Scott because she is living this kind of grounded Christianity that he also is wanting they date for a while. It takes her a while to decide on him. She’s worried that he’s marrying a minister, will make her small.
Her friends are worried. What if he doesn’t amount to anything? But she’s very impressed by his vision, by the ways that he has this drive to have this kind of socially committed ministry. And so ultimately she agrees to marry him. And just to give you a sense, they get married in June of 1953. She refuses to wear white. She does not wear a long dress. She wears a T length light blue dress in 1953 where this is not 1963, this is not 1973. This is not 1993. And she makes her very imposing father-in-law take obey out of the vows because she says it makes her feel like an indentured servant. This is Martin Luther King’s beloved, and I think seeing kind of the fullness of her politics and her spirit, and this is who Dr. King sort of Marys, I think also speaks to maybe different or bigger sense of who Martin Luther King is too.
Marc Steiner:
Yeah. I think that as you’re write about, I mean that Martin Luther King credits Coretta Scott King with making him the radical that he is, that changing his worldview
Jeanne Theoharis :
Because of the progressive party, the triple evils that we associate with kings last year, right. Racism, poverty, militarism,
Those she comes in with and she has that global vision and very much, one of the issues she really focuses on in the late fifties and early sixties is kind of global peace and anti-colonialism. She will be active in the anti-nuclear movement in the United States in 1962. She will go to Geneva with Women’s Strike for Peace to a 17 member Decir men conference trying to get the United States and the Soviet Union to sign a nuclear test ban treaty. And then when he gets the Nobel Prize in 1964, she really sees this as a broadened responsibility for him and for her to the world. And she begins to push him to come out against US involvement in Vietnam. And from 1965 on, she is publicly out against the war in Vietnam. She’s the only woman who speaks at a big rally at one of the big first rallies at Madison Square Garden in 1965. A reporter asks Dr. King afterwards sort of remarking on this, did you educate her? And he says, no, she educated me. So I mean, Reta Scott King is really, as both of them would say, the family leader around issues of kind of global peace. So in many ways, he leads on some issues, she leads on some issues, but I think we want to see that as a political partnership.
Marc Steiner:
So I want to talk a bit about as we bring this into the century we’re in today, that there’s been an effort of powerful effort to sanitize Martin Luther King to fit into this. I have a dream speech and that’s it. And to Deradicalize King to not make him a confrontational leader that he was.
Jeanne Theoharis :
Yeah.
Marc Steiner:
Talk a bit about that in terms of your analysis of how that happened, why that happened, and how we have pushed against that.
Jeanne Theoharis :
So I think all sorts of people misuse King Republicans as well as Democrats. And I think for our purposes today, I think we want to focus on the ways that liberals and moderates misuse him.
Because I think it’s sometimes easier to see, oh, when the FBI tweets out on Martin Luther King Day, were remembering Martin Luther King. There’s sort of something so absurd about it that we can just recognize that. But I think one of the things we’ve seen over and over from the beginning of Black Lives Matter more than a decade ago around the pro-Palestine demonstrations around anti-ice demonstrations that Dr. King tends to get rolled out to tell young activists, you’re not doing it the right way. You need to be less angry. You need to be less confrontational. You need to wear a suit. And I think that really misses both who Dr. King was and what a kind of politics of disruption he and many in the movement with him pursued and the kinds of criticisms they got for it. I think now we look back and whether we’re looking at the Montgomery Bus Boycott or whether we’re looking at the New York City School boycott in 1964, which was the biggest civil rights protest of the era happens in New York City,
And we assume, oh, we would’ve been with that. And in fact, many, many people, the national NAACP for instance, does not support the Montgomery Bus boycott, does not support that economic tactic at the time. They do support the legal case, but not the boycott. If we take the New York City School boycott the New York Times, who had been praising and reporting very seriously on King’s work in Birmingham, and we will see this with the Washington Post, we will see this with the LA Times. We will see this with the Chicago Tribune when the work gets closer to home, as King would say, as long as I was safe from them in the South, many of these national news outlets sort of covered the emerging Southern movement with rigor, with substance. They didn’t take public officials words verbatim. And then you get to New York, you get to Chicago, and that’s very different. So these are troublemakers, this is reckless. The New York Times, we’ll call the New York City School boycott, unreasonable, reckless, violent, in part because it’s disruptive in part because it’s meant to cost the city and state money. And so I think part of Southern King is also constraining what we see his non-violence to be about.
So we pacify it. Non-violence was about school boycotts. It was about rent strikes, it was about tenant unions and welfare unions. It was about disrupting the comforts of injustice because one of the key things that we can see him saying from Montgomery till the end of his life is that injustice is comfortable to too many people. The status quo works. And so in order to change that, you have to disrupt that and make people uncomfortable. Similar to what, again, black Lives Matter, the pro Palestine demonstrations, the anti-ice demonstrations, the notion that you have to disrupt. But I think we’ve taken that sense of disrupting injustice out of how we understand Dr. King. I think we’ve pitted him against young people. Some of my favorite stuff in the book is in Chicago. So in the mid sixties, king in the SELC join a huge movement in Chicago and help to expand that movement.
But that movement has been organizing for years to take on housing segregation, to take on the conditions in Chicago slums to take on economic inequality and job discrimination, to take on city negligence and public services, all these, and one of the things that King does in 1966 is he spends hundreds of hours working with gang members and sees in them real leadership potential, real organizing potential. And this is not just like pull your pants up, kind of talk. This is serious long conversations about how to take on the political economy of Chicago. And these gang members, these gang leaders who worked with King talked about, they didn’t agree on everything, but as the head of the Vice, Lord said, you couldn’t help but fall in love with him. But that’s not an image we have of King spending hours and hours with gang members and developing their leadership in the movements in Chicago, again, around unequal housing and unequal jobs.
Marc Steiner:
It was a period that people actually need to know more about. We come back and do a longer piece on that alone just as a lesson. I mean, it’s when that was happening, I was allied with the Young Patriots, which was the white gang of Appalachian whites, and they were in this Rainbow coalition. People don’t even realize how powerful that was at that moment. And so I say that now to think about what all of this teaches us about and how it talks to us about where we are today with Palestine, the struggle that’s going on in Palestine with this kind of neo right takeover of the United States and what King did to confront and others to end segregation and to fight against racism and to open America up. How do those things talk to us about this moment that we face right now?
Jeanne Theoharis :
I mean, I think some of the lessons that I draw both from Dr. King and Credit Scott King and also from Rosa Parks, is the ways that we’ve somehow made the Civil Rights movement seem obvious when in fact, part of the genius of people like Rosa Parks, like the Kings is their ability to move without having a clear sign that it’s going to do anything. I think we often get trapped today in trying to figure out what will be effective. And obviously those conversations are important, but I think we miss that part of what the Civil Rights Movement teaches us. Part of what looking at Dr. King’s life teaches us is that you try a bunch of things, you’re going at it a bunch of ways and you lose a lot, and that you can’t kind of measure what you’re going to do on some sort of sureness or some sort of calculation that it will work. Because in some sense, part of what, and I’m going to use Rosa Parks here, the summer before Rosa Parks makes her bus stand, she goes to Highlander Folk School. Highlander is an adult organizer training school in Tennessee at the time,
Marc Steiner:
Multiracial radical school
Jeanne Theoharis :
Multiracial radical. It really lifts her spirits. She goes to a two week workshop around implementing school desegregation in 1955, and yet on the last day, they do the go wrong. What are you going to do when you get home? And she says, there’s never going to be a mass movement in Montgomery. And so I’m going to keep working with the young people. And people like Rosa Parks, people like Dr. King we’re very worried about, could you ever get people to unite? Could you ever get a mass movement given the level of fear, given the level of reprisals, given the kind of class divisions. And yet when the Women’s Political Council decides to call for a boycott that day, the kings, they get up at 5:00 AM they’re hoping it’s going to work, and then they see the buses and it has, and that changes what’s Im imaginable. And so that one day boycott, and no one wants to speak at that mass meeting that night, none of the ministers, and Edie Nixon, who’s a longtime organizer, basically is trying to shame the ministers and being like, you guys are all cowards. And Dr. King’s like, I’m not a coward. And so basically, he volunteers to speak at the mass meeting that nobody wants to speak at because nobody, and it’s that night, that first night that the community feeling the power of that first day decides to change that one day boycott into an indefinite boycott.
So in many ways, I think that the second lesson here, besides what you don’t know, what’s going to work, is that being in motion expands what’s possible. So that night it’s like, okay, we’re going to do this indefinitely. Then six weeks in the King’s House gets bombed. Coretta and their baby two month old baby Yolanda are home. And Coretta thankfully gets them both out safely. But guess what? Both their dads show up that night and they’re like, oh no, you’re not being in this house with a baby having this happen. All of us can imagine this, right? Both dads. And she’s like, we’re not going anywhere. I’m not leaving. They want them all to leave, and if Martin’s going to be too stubborn, then Cor and the baby have to leave because we can’t have the baby under these conditions. And she’s like, no. And so that decision will then change the scope of the movement again, because in some ways what that bomb was intended to do was to try a different tactic to sort of unsettle or shorten the movement. And she was like, no, we’re not going anywhere. And I think the third thing is that they’re scared. And I think we forget this.
I think there’s a way, particularly with King, where it just seems like he’s built from different material. And in some ways, most of us don’t have those eloquent abilities to kind of draw the metaphors that he can. But he’s terrified that first night when he goes to speak, he’s shaking. He may have had a panic attack. I mean, he was terrified. They’re terrified. And I think the third thing to learn from them is part of what they are able to do is to be scared and to move. Anyways. So I think that’s the third thing is that sometimes the way that the civil rights movement appears in movies is like you’re scared, but then you have some sort of revelation and then you’re not scared. And that’s not true.
Marc Steiner:
No.
Jeanne Theoharis :
And so learning how to both acknowledge the fear and to move with the fear, I think is another lesson for us today, because it’s not going to not be scary, and they’re not going to not be costs.
Marc Steiner:
And what you’re saying is absolutely correct. I mean, in those days, I was terrified every second of every moment of every day we were in the Civil Rights movement that I could be killed, tortured. We were all terrified. But you didn’t stop,
Jeanne Theoharis :
Right.
Marc Steiner:
So what does that say about we are facing, I think in this country at this moment, we’re on a precipice and a very dangerous place. Everything that people think about America could be turned upside down. You’ve seen the repression across the country, immigrants being rounded up, people trying to defend immigrants being rounded up, and it is beyond that. So you’re seeing this massive push. So I’m wondering from your perspective as historian, as an activist as well, what those moments that you study write about, share with us, say to us now about what we face, what the Palestinians face, what black people face in America, what Americans face with this right wing growth, that’s a reaction to everything we fought for and changed. So what does it say to us now? What does it say to you?
Jeanne Theoharis :
I think one of the other things it says to me is that courage begets courage. So if we take the snapshot of Rosa Parks on the bus or we take a snapshot of King deciding, okay, I will speak at that mass meeting tonight, even though no one wants to, then it’s terrifying, then you’re alone. But I think what we then see the next day is, okay, nobody stands up on the bus with Rosa Parks, but that Monday she’s terrified that they’ve called this boycott for that Monday and nobody’s going to do it. And then they do. One of I think, the greatest gifts and getting to sort of spend many years studying Dr. King, that I think perhaps his greatest gift is that his courage made people feel their own courage.
It wasn’t just that he was incredibly eloquent. It was that in his actions, people found their own actions. So I think one of the other lessons that I take is the ways that stepping forward both opens up possibilities, but also that other people, and maybe it’s not as many as we would want at first, but that I think it also provides a path for other people to step forward too. And so even if it feels, oh, our numbers are so small, I think the perspective of history is that our heroes keep stepping forward and then the numbers get bigger. And so I think that’s one lesson I take. I think another lesson I take is the ways that they’re learning and listening. And I think that’s not often a word we think about with Dr. King. We’re so used to seeing him on the podium. But so many people talk about Dr. King being a good listener.
And I think that’s another skill for this moment is sitting there is hearing what people need so that then we can craft a way forward together and to kind of keep expanding how in some ways, if we look at the ways, if we’re thinking about Chicago and the Poor People’s Campaign, this kind of bringing in more people and bringing in more people. And one of the things that the Kings do very well is from the bus boycott on, they’re meeting people around the country who are doing the work, and then they keep bringing them in. And so some of those gang members I was talking about, when King goes down to Mississippi to take part in the Meredith march, he brings some of those gang members with him. He brings some of the Puerto Rican organizers in New York that he’d been working with down there too. So then we get to the Poor People’s campaign and there’s people from all around the country. So I think that sense of listening and of expanding,
Marc Steiner:
I know we have to close out here. I wonder for you and your thinking and yourself and what your books say if there is hope in that, in terms of confronting what we face today, whether it’s Palestine Israel, or whether it’s the repression taking place in the cities throughout America right now, rounding up immigrants, I mean the right wing push.
Jeanne Theoharis :
So I think it’s both gives me kind of soberness and hope. When you look at the history of the civil rights movement, you look at kind of how these movements in the North are treated and Dr. King is treated in the north. I think it’s a reminder that our activism is not necessarily going to be praised in the moment. And I think that’s another myth. This notion that you shine a light on injustice. This is George Bush’s take on Rosa Parks. She shined a light on injustice and then injustice was changed. That would be nice. That’s not how it really works. And so I think remembering that the kinds of criticisms that we get, that we’re being unreasonable, that we’re being troublemakers, the ways that it feels lonely, we stand on many shoulders who have felt that same way and who have had those very same criticisms. Even though now today, all those people are like, “Oh yeah, I would’ve been with King…”
Marc Steiner:
Right.
Jeanne Theoharis :
So I think that’s sobering. I think what’s hopeful is the ways one of King’s other, in my opinion, greatest gifts is his ability. I was talking about this kind of expanding, but that one of the things that he does is when faced with pressure, he doubles down. And I think that’s a lesson for us too, because I think sometimes it’s so dispiriting. It’s like, this isn’t working. We don’t have the numbers. And then I think taking that lesson that instead of shrinking or getting smaller, we go deeper and we go harder, and that we stand on shoulders like Dr. King’s when we do so. Because I think going back to where we started this conversation, I think one of the worst things about the ways that King is sanitized and lobbed at activists today is that those shoulders are taken from us.
When I was doing the research on Rosa Parks, I came upon some of her notes, speech notes during the boycott, and she’s talking about how she’s reading about Mary McLeod Bethune and she’s reading about Sojourner Truth that our heroes also needed to stand on shoulders, right? There was tremendous kind of sustenance to learning that people had gone before them. And so to me, one of the real dangers in the way that King is kind of turned into this respectability politics, just be nice and wear a suit kind of guy, is that it takes him from us and from this generation of activists when again, as you’re saying, we need him more than ever. We need this. Which is not to say we’re going to do it exactly the same way, but again, many of the lessons, tenant unions, rent strikes, blocking traffic, all these things are techniques that King and friends are using.
Marc Steiner:
It’s always a pleasure to talk to you, and I really will link to all the work you’ve been doing to people get this new book about King of the North and really kind of dive into it. Maybe we’ll have another conversation about that specifically someday soon. And I want to thank you so much for taking the time for all of our listeners here at The Real News and being part of the program today.
Jeanne Theoharis :
Thank you so much for having me.
Marc Steiner:
Once again, I want to thank Dr. Jean Theo Harris for joining us today, and we’ll be looking to her work here on this site. And thanks to David Hebdon for running the program today, audio editor Stephen Frank for working his magic rosette, so for producing the Mark Steiner show and putting up with me and the tireless Keller of our Making it All Work behind the scenes. And everyone here at Real News will making this show possible. So please let me know what you thought about, what you heard today, what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at ss@therealnews.com and I’ll get right back to you. Once again, thank you Jean o’ Harris for joining us today. So for the crew here through Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved. Keep listening, and take care.
