Coming up on the AID Building.
Nineteen sixty eight, the murder of doctor King, which traumatized everyone.
State patrol came to campus. They were beating students, they were shooting tear gas into the dorm rooms of Clark.
It's not just killing us as a humanity, but it's killing our neighbor's.
Globally, the FBI had a role in the murder of a black panther leader.
Sam Jackson was exploring his future on the Moorhouse campus.
To be in what we really thought was a revolution or was a revolution. I mean people were die. I remember when doctor King was assassinated. I flew from Atlanta to Memphis in March with you know those people that night.
I'm Hans Charles.
I'm in Lechlamomba.
And this podcast is about the student lock in of the board of trustees at Morehouse College in nineteen sixty nine. Samuel L. Jackson was one of those students. Martin Luther King Senior was on the board of trustees.
It's a story about protest, the struggle for black rights and freedom of speech that echoing today's world far louder than they should. It's a lesson to us now more than ever and it will blow your mind.
The A Building Episode one, thirty nine years old.
What is the Perfect tist?
Not of money, not of possessions, but of ideas.
In the nineteen sixties, America found itself in war of ideas with high stakes. The stakes were the soul of America.
Leaders like Malcolm X spoke to these times in these issues.
Look at the American Revolution in seventeen seventy six.
That revolution was for what for lane? Why did they want land independence?
How was it carried out? Bloodshed?
Right number one? That was based on land the basis of independence, and the only way they could get.
It was bloodshed.
You haven't got a revolution that doesn't involve bloodshed. And you're afraid to bleed. I saw you were afraid to bleed. As long as the white man send you to Korea, you bled. He sent you to Germany, you bled. He sent you to the South Pacific to fight the Japanese.
You bled. You bleed for white people.
But when it comes times to seeing your own churches being.
Bombed in little black girls who murd you haven't gotten no good.
February twenty first, nineteen sixty five. Malcolm xis killed during this speech in New York City. He was thirty nine years old.
Doctor Martin Luther King Junior, a more houseman, a freedom fighter, another soldier in the war against oppression. At the end of his life, his rhetoric becomes more militant, a far cry from the hopeful optimism of the I have a dream speech.
Strangely enough, I would turn to the Almighty and say, if you allow me to live just a few.
Years in the second half of the twentieth century, I will be happy. And that's a strange statement to make, because the world.
Is all messed up.
The nation is sick, trouble is in the land, confusion all around.
That's a strange statement. Something is happening in our world.
The masses of people.
Arising up.
And wherever they.
Are the symbol today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa, Nairobi, Kenya, Acro Ghana, New York City, Atlanta, Georgia, Jackson, Mississippi.
Are Memphis, Tennessee. The cry is always the same, we want to be free.
It is no longer the choice.
Between violence and nonviolence in this world is nonviolence on non existence.
That is where we are today.
April fourth, nineteen sixty eight, Doctor King is killed in Memphis, Tennessee's nine years old. Here's Samuel L. Jackson discussing exactly that on the Henry Wallin show back in two thousand and seven.
I remember the night Doctor King was assassinated. I was at a campus movie. Me and revolutionary because I still like movies. But so I was at a campus movie and the movie was John GoFar Police come home. And a guy came in and said, Doctor.
King has been killed. You motherfucker's sitting in here and watch a fucking movie.
We need to be in the streets tan some shit.
Up, no, And everybody's like, all right, all right, all right, we will just let us finish watching the movie.
On April nineteenth, nineteen sixty nine, a group of Morehouse College students hijack the Board of trustees meeting. They held the board hostage for two days. They made demands for improved student services and curriculum. Martin Luther King, Senior is one of the hostages. Samuel L. Jackson is one of the students. The students planned the heist a heist of idea.
Before you hear this story, you need to know the state of black America. After the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin.
Luther King, we wanted to speak with students were at Morehouse during the time of the Locke in so.
We spoke to doctor Michael Lomex, Morehouse alum, nineteen sixty eight, president and CEO of the United Negro College Fund and former president of Dillard University in New Orleans, Louisiana.
I think about one of the people who did lock up the trustees, Sam Jackson. Sam was from Chattanooga, Tennessee. He was exploring his future on the Moorhouse campus. No one would have ever thought that he was going to become a worldwide recognized film actor.
And you will know my name is the law when I lay my vengeance upon the.
But his whole career and the approach that he's taken to his career, as I've never said this to him, I'm saying this to you, has been informed by the events of nineteen sixty eight, the murder of doctor King,
which traumatized everyone. You know, doctor King was in many ways prior to sixty eight, obviously a leader, but not revered in the way that he became after his martyrdom, and elements of his voice were not really attended to his opposition to the war in Vietnam, his focus on poor people, those were not the integrating of the establishment
institutions that most people had signed on for. So after he gets killed, there's not only a void in leadership, but there are other voices that begin to be heard that hadn't got and the kind of attention when he was on the stage. So you're beginning to hear the voices of Stokely Carmike.
Violence is a part of America's culture as American as.
Cherry pie and black power.
You're beginning to hear the voices of other post colonial African leaders and theorists about a more global, pan African approach to liberation. Black people begin to at some level connect with other oppressed people, like the Vietnamese, like the Palestinians.
Welcome back to the A buildings. To gain a better understanding of what might have motivated these students, we speak to Professor Philosophy at Morehouse College, doctor Elia Davis.
First of all, Doctor Davis, I want to thank you for going to do this with us. This story has been an obsession for Hans and I for God going on five six years now. You know the folklore behind it. We've been talking about, I mean literally since we met twenty years ago. We would just love to hear about you, your background at Morehouse, What brought you to Morehouse as a student, and what kept you there as an educator all these years?
Am I supposed to be honest?
Oh?
Yeah, we will be honest absolutely.
I was born in July, the month before the Watch Riot nineteen sixty five.
Six days of rioting in the Negro section of Los Angeles left behind the scenes reminiscent of war torn cities. More than one hundred square blocks were decimated by fire and looters, and few buildings were left intact.
They blew up my grandfather's home, and interestingly enough, his home was on the front of newsweek magazine Ablaze. And so because of that impetus, my mother quickly returned to her home of Atlanta, Georgia, and so I was reared here from about a year and a half until my mother said you will attend Morehouse College. And I didn't want to because I didn't know what Morehouse College was. I had no idea where it was. I lived two miles away from the campus. So I went to Morehouse
had no money. Few government funds assisted me. But after my first semester there after having joined the Morehouse College Glee Club, I was given a full talent grant, which meant that they covered my all of my tuition, and
I owed them singing until I graduated. So I'm in nineteen eighty nine philosophy graduate of Morehouse College, and I've been at Morehouse ever since then, teaching political philosophy, Africano philosophy, intro the philosophy critical thinking, and now my position, I'm pretty much the dean director of freshman and seniors academic success. So I bring them in and the hope is that I'll take them out.
When did you first hear about this lock in at Morehouse or this particular incident of what was some of the kind of general folklore behind it.
Just like behins, I'm sure it was apocryphal at best. So it's not even about whether that is true. It was just a wonderful more House story when you get to Morehouse, true or not? No, no, because the fundamental point was motivating us to be radical. See that was the kicker. They don't give a damn whether or not it's true. We want you all to be radical, and it normally came from students. Matter of fact, I don't think I ever heard a professor talk about it. It
was always upperclassmen. And not until Sam Jackson became Sam Jackson did we even include his.
Name to be in.
What we really thought was a revolution or was a revolution.
I mean people were dying.
I remember when doctor King was assassinated. I flew from Atlanta to Memphis in March with you know those people that night.
Because when out the school he was a Sam Jackson. Sam Jackson, So nineteen eighty five, eighty six, eighty so who is he?
Yeah?
Right, So it wasn't like now or they'll say Sam Jackson held the board. Yeah, we didn't have that. What we did have was a story of Martin Luther King's senior. That was funny to us, especially those of us who grew up in Atlanta with the bourgeois sensibilities that associated with them, is that, oh wow, they even locked up. Daddy came and I even went back. I read Gloss's evaluations of what he called student protesting.
Doctor Hugh Gloucester was more House College president during the lock in. He had a conservative approach to managing the student body compared to his predecessor, Doctor Benjamin Emains more on these two men later.
And Gloucester was a very refined scholar. And so on one occasion there was a group of students who were trying to protest and decided to go to Gloucester's house to protest. And he was infuriated and came out and told them it wasn't that important, and I fired, it offensive for you all to have come to my house to protest, all right. It always amazes me how, like, you know, what a protest is supposed to really create this sense of, you know, antagonism towards we're not on
your team. It was just funny when I hear people say, don't do that. That bothers me, irritates me.
It's it's fascinating that you make that point. Because in the research Melican, I found a letter that doctor Mays wrote sort of in the moment, and he's taking notes, he's sort of taking a diary.
And the title is Prisoner in Heartness, Hall Black and Daily. He's writing from inside the lock in and he all he's pissed, and.
I quote some of the group of students were most insulting. So he curse and used vulgar language. And this was fascinating to me because they're you know, like there's a quote and they were doctor Doctor King Senior says that he doesn't want the name of his son to be hijacked for for whatever these radical students are doing.
One of the demands that the student has was to have the school's consolidates and to be named m o K University, and an m o K senior was Adam Lee against this.
And I didn't understand how these distinguished scholars who we you know, revered you know, I revered doctor Mays, you know he has he has the memorial on campus, how there was no reconciliation of this moment of protests from from King MegaR Evers, Malcolm and to these students that there that that this distinguished scholar did not make this through line m hm.
And that's the question I.
Have for you, like, what is your analysis of this disconnect, this this lack of reconciliation.
He grounded his life in certain principles such that he would sacrifice any and everything to maintain them. Example, going to I believe it was a board meeting and it was getting on the elevator with the white gentleman he was with black guy. Cleaner couldn't get on the elevator. Maze's response was, I will not ride the elevator until he can, and he would walk the stairs. Another thing, Hans,
you never see Mays with a hat on. It is told, maybe apocryphally, but it was told somebody slapped the hat off his head one time. He said, I'll never wear a hat. Want it allow you to knock.
A hat off my head.
That's a very strong principal person, you understand. So it's like, hmm. Now, when we came to Moorhouse and we were trying to protest, because we did some minor protest, they told us the story of students were protesting the food in the dining hall and had gone to the office Harkness Hall to complain and Mays was coming back in town and he looked at them. He said, I'm ashamed of you all. Just left the country where people were fighting for the rights to vote for democracy, and this is what you
all came in with the food. That's it. And it was always important for me to realize that's his principle, right, that's unfair. That's what he was looking at this is not fair. It's not fair. I think he cultivated that since in Martin, Luther King, Junior, Maynard Jackson, Laron Bennett, I mean, you name it. From nineteen forty to nineteen sixty seven he was president. And so for us that stood out like damn, we need to be down with
you know. And again that's the same way we heard about the story of Hartin's Hall with the boy being held captive. They were trying to motivate us, to let us know, you can't be at more House and not get with the program. And so even if you were, you all probably already read many of the nineteen sixty nine Maroon Tigers. They are replete with story of the story of rebellion. It is a ma and I have
several of them that I downloaded. I mean, these brothers, they're calling each other out in ways that I wish my students were today. I mean, one guy says he didn't even know who he is at Morehouse because the teachers aren't letting him be who he should be. He was having an overwhelming impact on these guys, thinking about when you commit yourself to a certain way of being
in the world. So unlike I think Gloucester. I think Mays might have had a little more wiggle room for certain types of protests, because you remember the funt where you know, one of the biggest problems was just having white people on the board. May's had a certain position about there. Remember when May's was given the opportunity to
write articles. I think he wrote somewhere fifteen hundred articles while he was president of Morehouse and all of the black periodicals, Daily World, you name it, Pittsburgh Courier, and he was making an argument for integration. His point was, if you all think integration is what you have claimed, if you think it's going to satisfy the social organization, you think, why don't you bust white kids to our black schools? Because you said it was the same right.
So obviously they weren't going to do that. But Mays was also interested in hiring white professors because this point was, how then do we turn and ask them to hire our graduates. So he had some strategy here, and I'm associating that with the Board of trustees. His belief was,
you don't limit it that way. We're trying to live in a world that has to embrace a certain type of diversity, because when we leave Morehouse, we're going to ask to be members of these organizations that are dominated by white people, And how do we do that when we say, we don't do it? And that's again, that's a principal position. Whatever you're doing the left, you're doing the right. What is fan for one should be fair for the other.
But that seems to be in the detail a of Morehouse because when I was a student there, this is the exact thing that we wrestled against. We felt that we were we.
Were just a part of the Morehouse man thing.
This is That is kind of what I want you to speak to, doctor Davis, is this feels like the mystique of the more House man. This this person who comes in and with this radical energy, but then has a framework, leaves with the framework of how to integrate, and then just decides on their own when they leave.
Can you speak to that?
Is that?
Am I reading that correctly?
What are your thoughts on there?
Well? Oftentimes, especially because of my present position, it's difficult to disabuse students of what they came to Morehouse with. So I'll say it this way. So I think Morehouse might be and I can't prove it, but I'm going to say it. It's the only school in the country where people send their sons to be saved. To be saved. We get these guys in, but they're filled with apocryphal stories.
They're filled with myths that aren't most productive about Morehouse and then, believe it or not, I will get students every year who will come in my office and say things like, I don't think I belong here, I can't do it, can't do what. I don't think I can be a Morehouse man.
Huh.
One kid comes to me and says, I can't be here anymore. I'm not black enough. What do you mean not black enough? He's like, I have two white mothers. She adopted me and my sister. And I just left a class where the stories the students were telling I wasn't familiar with. I said, stop, I know your class demographics. They ain't made like that either. Now you off see, I'm like, you all have seen some nice movies, You've
heard some stories, some rap lyrics. I know your class demographics. Dog, I know they're not and they shouldn't be made that way. Do you understand it?
Yeah, huwork, I know you know.
What I've never celebrated. That's nothing to be celebrated. Stop walking around here celebrating poverty and danger. I will switch places with you. You all have to embrace the sacrifices your families have made. So all of this goes into the Morehouse Man.
Let's sidebar here for one second. Whenever people talk about Morehouse College, the conversation eventually turns to the Morehouse bestique. That energy, that aura the student's faculty and alumni seemed to personify. Doctor Benjamin E. Mays, a distinguished former president of Morehouse, was once quoted saying of the school, over the heads of her students, she holds a crown that she challenges them to grow tall enough to wear. Doctor Mays conceived of a set of ideals to build a
campus culture and the characters of his students. He felt these ideals would help them succeed in and transform the world. He coined these ideals the more House mystique. Some of these ideals include leadership, fearlessness, honor in a deep rooted sense of morality, and if you met the challenge and reach these standards, you could call yourself a more Houseman.
Even with the protests during you know what twenty twenty one. A lot of those students were motivated because they felt left out. They really felt left out, even if they were just intellectual gymnastics for them, as in they've heard about and now they want.
To welcome back to the A building. Here's more from our conversation with doctor Eliot Davis.
And even that happened to me in nineteen ninety three when Rodney King verdict came out and I was in grad school, but over at Morehouse Belman Cau. You know, they had we had our own little uprising where the police came, State patrol came to campus. They were beating students. They were shooting tear gas into the dorm rooms of Clark. They came a Moorhouse class. I had never been burned by tear gas until that day. They were shooting tear
gas bottles at us YadA, YadA, YadA. Students Morehouse started covering their faces with bandanas, putting on hats, making Molotov cocktails.
Hunh wow exactly.
So as we were standing over in front of Sale Hall and the police had covered the entire gate area that led out, some of these students ran around the back of them, got an Atlanta police car, flipped it over and threw and blew it up with a Molotov contail. And this is my point about wanting to feel like I can do it partally. Yeah, I blew it out. I blew it out. They were throwing we were throwing rocks at the police. I mean they kept it off television because had it been seen, it would have been
reupted in ways across black campuses. They weren't prepared for, because I'm telling you there were probably two three hundred state troopers on our campuses at Clark beating. I heard the beat. They literally were beaten. One guy, stay down, nigga, no beating them saying this right. All of this was going on, and I was in grad school, the CAU in African American Studies. I was the vice president of the Graduate Students. I ran over the Heartness Hall back
to Hertness Hall. I running the Heartness Hall up to the floor with the president's office and the provosts. I knew them. I'm yelling I won't say here, come out this dam. I'm cursing, like, get out of here.
Now.
The police are on our campus. They're beating our students. The provost comes out or Elliot was wrong. I said, dude, you need to get out of the president Cole. He comes out, He was like, I am now, yeah, it's tied down, sleeves rolled up. He goes out of the middle of the street. Get them off my blank of the blank campus. They had not been on our campuses. Do you know in the sixties they always wanted to have in roads and they never could. This was the
first time, yes, that they came on our campus. Because our campus was supposed to be the safe haven.
It was the safe spot.
Yes, it's where the good crows are.
It was gone Cole. I loved him so much that man stood out there in the middle of the street, which was Fair Street.
Now now.
He was yelling, get off my campus. How dare you? And Martin Portly, you didn't call me, you came on my campus. So that protests just, oh my god. Everybody felt good after that one because everybody got a little piece of history.
Do you think that was part of some of the tension in nineteen sixty nine at that lock in?
Yes, yes, that's why I told you. If you look at the articles from sixty nine, they were merely acting out what had been written about that whole year. They are constantly saying, we need to do this. We're not radical, gotta be radical. Where's the radicality? Dude? This is one This is a student here, Drake, and he wrote an article, as I see it, a deep injustice by the American press has caused me to pin my final article of the year. The American press has created monster which has
caused politicians and sociologists to toil night and day. I call it the Hustler's carnival. Others call it a riot. But again, this paper is from May nineteen sixty eight.
So okay, before yeah, yeah, but it's right after Martin Luther.
The King is dumb, Yes, April fourth, he's out.
So it really was this kind of a powdered keg of emotions just in general. You have Malcolm assassination, you have Doctor King's assassination, You're kind to have the end of the sixties, you have this cultural shift happening, and then it's like, okay, you have this again, this educated class, and where's our role in this? What are we going to do to affect the change in this A great example of the complexities of this debate among the black
community can be found. I guess that since nineteen eighty seven play The Meeting. This play is a fictitious account of a historical meeting between Doctor King and Malcolm X where they discuss their political differences. Here's an excerpt from that play. Welcome. You want to free Bloods. I want to free America. It is the only way any of us can be free.
Martin kent to see what's happening to us.
Five years from our tenant, the most racists won't have to do anything to.
Us, will be doing it to ourselves.
So these these brothers who sit peacefully and your demonstrations and allow their hair is to be split open, don't you know, they come right back to their own.
Communities and come in violent access.
The rage, just the hurt that's all balled up.
A said, It makes them strike out and the only way they can the only way that's acceptable. Now.
I cannot free us from that rage, but at least I can direct it to the race, so us we don't.
We both want the same things.
You want us to be able to buy a cup of coffee. I want us to sell it. You want us to integrate a coffee shop. I want us to own it. You want white people to hire us, I want us to hire our own down self.
No, we know what the same thing.
I'm afraid that this quest that you have for integration will wind up being a white man's solution for control.
Man.
Those of us that don't agree with your definition of power and control, I suppose where to be called Uncle.
Tom's Here's more from doctor Michael Lomax.
What happened by going to Morehouse is that I encountered an institution unlike any I'd ever encountered before. I met students like me from all over the South by in large because there weren't a lot of people from California at Morehouse. When you walked onto that campus, you were entering a community with which was safe, and there could be all kinds of other things happening on the other
side of those gates that were hostile. If I went off of the Moorhouse campus as I did, into the west End, and there was a series Roebuck and that was the first place I got called the N word by a white person. When I went and protested in behalf of the people who had been assaulted in Selma by marching around the Federal building. The Atlanta police would call you offline and take down your information and take
your photograph. I could be intimidated, but when I stepped on that campus, where black and white, Christian and Jew.
Were all equal, you were safe.
The only purpose that that institution was there for was to prepare you and give you the credentials, the capabilities, the confidence to become what was an emerging concept, a Morehouse man, and take your place as a leader in the world.
Historically, Black College has essentially missed the protest era of the nineteen sixties. In this context, it was time for a revolt. It was time for a protest, It was time for a heist. But this heights had to be more than about one thing. At this point, two great civil rights icons have been murdered in the prime of their lives in front of the world. The Black experience was literally on trial.
It's April ninth, nineteen sixty eight. Doctor King has a small funeral at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia. Mostly friends and family aren't attendants. After the private service, a three mile procession led to Morehouse College for the public memorial. Several Morehouse students serve as ushers for the event. One of the ushers on that day was future superstar Samuel L.
Jackson.
You were usher, It is few well what was that daylight?
Wow? Pretty solemn. More House, like many historic GUBAC cologies, was a socially conservative space with limited services and access to academic freedom. This serves as a sharp contrast to the resistance scene at predominantly white cologies during the sixties.
Doctor King's death would serve as an extreme reminder of how much work was left a true American progress. After the service, the students at Morehouse would approach the Administration for reform. Morehouse would have to be the center of this new wave of resistance. Malcolm and Martin.
Both lie dead.
Their eulogies represent great pieces of oratory, legend, history, and storytelling. Here is the eulogy of Malcolm X, delivered by screen actor Assi Davis Pierre.
At this final hour, in this quiet place, Harlem has come to bid farewell to one of the brightest hopes, extinguished now and gone from us forever. For Harlem is where he worked and where he struggled and fought. There are those who will consider it their duty as friends of the Negro people to tell us, to revile him, to flee even from the presence of his memory, to save ourselves by writing him out of the history.
Of our turbulent times.
Many will ask what Harlem finds to honor in this stormy, controversial, and bold young captain, And we will smile.
Many will say, turn away away from.
This man, for he is not a man but a demon, a monster, a wider, and an enemy of the black man, and we will smile. They will say that he is of hate, a fanatic, a racist, who can only bring evil to the cause for which you struggle, And we will answer and say, unto them, did you ever talk to brother Malcolm? Did you ever touch him or have him smile at you? Did you ever really listen to him?
Did he ever do a mean thing?
Was he ever himself associated with violence or any public disturbance? For if you did, you would know him, And if you knew him, you would know why we must honor him. Malcolm was our manhood, our living black manhood.
This was his meaning to his people.
And in honoring him we are another best in ourselves. However much we differed with him or with each other about him and his value as a man, let his going from us serve only to bring us together. Now consigning these mortal remains to earth, the common Mother of all, secure in the knowledge that what we place in the ground is no more now a man, but a seed, which, after the winter of discontent, will come forth again to meet us.
And we shall know him then for what he was and is, a prince, our own, black, shining prince, who did not hesitate to die because he loved us.
So Minister Benjamin May's cave, Doctor King's ulithy. He was a president of Moorhouse College while doctor King was a student. His word was speak to the moment and the weight of his death.
My dearest friend is now in the hands of the eternal God. We therefore commit his body to the ground. The cemetery is too small for his spirit, but we commit his body to the ground. The grave is too narrow for his soul, but we commit his body.
To the ground.
No coffin, no crip, no vault, no stone can hold his greatness, but we commit his body to the ground. We commend his deeds to all mankind, his services and sacrifices to all generations. We commend his legacy of courage and love to ourselves, our children, and our children's children. We commend his life to the universe. We give thanks to God who gave us a leader to heal the
white man's sickness and the black man's slavery. We give thanks to God who gave us a peaceful warrior, who built an army and a movement that is mighty without missiles, able without anatomic arsenal ready without rockets, real without bullets, an army tutored in living and loving and not in killing. We thank God forgiving us a leader who was willing to die but not willing to kill. Peace be to his ashes, and rest to his soul.
How do you plan a heist when the stakes are the future of black America?
The students weren't just asking for change, they were making it. But what happens when you hold a college hostage? Next time on the A Building?
Would you love to see one of these NFL owners when somebody disrespects our flag to say, get that son of a bitch off the field right now out. He's fired. He's fired.
The A Building is produced by Imagine Audio for iHeart Podcasts. It is written and hosted by me Hans Charles and my co host menelike La Mumba.
It is executive produced by Karral Welker and Nathan klok Me, menelik Wamomba and Hans Charles.
Executive producers at iHeart Podcasts ar Katrina Norville and Nikki Torre. Marketing lead is David Wasserman.
It is produced, directed, and edited by Timothy Fernara with producer John Asanti, Sound design and music by Alloy.
Trex and special thanks to April Ryan, Doctor, Elia Davis, Kim vc Ada, Bobby Know and James Early. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to rate and review the A Building on Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.
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