Push it in. I'm Khalil Jibron Muhammad.
I'm Ben Austen. We're two best friends, one black, one white.
I'm a historian and I'm a journalist. And this is some of my best friends are.
Some of my best friends are In this show, we wrestle with the challenges and.
The absurdities of a deeply.
Divided and unequal country.
In this episode, we are taking a deeper look at a human being who helped lead a movement to end racism in America. He paid the ultimate price for changing the course of history, even though we still haven't lived up to his dream.
Hm hm, Well put Khalil because we are talking, of course about the doctor Martin Luther King Jr. And today on the show, we're talking to my friend Jonathan I who has a new biography called King A Life Man. He did dozens of new interviews of firsthand witnesses to history and also examine never before seeing FBI documents.
Jonathan also wrote one of the foremost and most recent biographies of Muhammad Ali, which includes stories about my great grandpa Elijah Muhammad Man.
Don't you wish he did someone yours?
You just stole my line khalil.
Ah.
Man, you know, I am excited about this conversation with Jonathan, but I wanted to start us off by just telling you and like having a conversation about the first time I learned about King.
But you go first.
When did you first like have a King encounter?
Okay, So we didn't go to the same grade school, the same elementary school, but my public school on the South Side that we had a King celebration every year in February, and it was it was always music. There were always like these people who came in and had us sing songs together, and it was kind of wonderful, but it was also like the more sort of anodyne version of King. I now know, you know, like, uh, you know, doctor King told us about his dream kind of kind of songs. Yes, what about you.
Well, the funny thing is, man, I have no recollection of doctor King throughout middle school or high school, and that's probably not what happened. I'm sure at some point, you know, there was one of those really tired, you know, profile images of him on the bulletin board at some point. So in college, though, I had a real sort of come to King moment where I confronted face to face like the controversy and the politicized backlash against the early
days of King's holiday. So got to Penn in Philadelphia in late nineteen eighties and I was a freshman. They were just institutionalizing annual King rituals, and that was kind of the beginning for me. It was the first time I ever remember like not doing anything but learning about
doctor King. But fast forward two years later, my junior year, and a columnist at Penn writes a searing critique of the annual celebrations of Doctor King now two years later and basically said, yeah, he said, this dude was a communist who wanted to take money from white people to redistribute it to black people. And man, I took this so personally that I organized one of the first student
demonstrations that I ever participated in. And in some ways, it was that moment that made me think that I don't really know enough about doctor King's actual life to defend his legacy. And I felt a little bit vulnerable in being emotionally upset about what I read but not really understanding, like was doctor King communists?
And what does it mean? And what does that mean to redistribute wealth. Is that even a bad thing?
Exactly?
Yeah, I love that. So let's hear from John. He's going to help us understand this more. And we both read this book, King of Life, and let's jump into this conversation.
Let's do it, all right, John, John, I welcome to some of my best friends are man. This is such a treat to have you a Chicagoan, a biographer of part of my family history. This is a very special moment for me, and I know you and Ben have some history yourselves.
Thanks Khalil, I'm excited to talk to you guys.
Yeah, yeah, congratulations on this amazing book, King a Life. It's now a national bestseller and very worthy of it, and so congrats.
Thanks feeling Yes, So, I mean, here is a man who may be one of the most celebrated and misunderstood figures in American history. I I was really excited to read this. I know that she found some new things. And I guess one way to start this conversation is just like you know, doctor King is captured as its adult civil rights icon. But of course he was a kid, and so tell us something new about his childhood that would surprise our listeners.
That would surprise us.
Well, first of all, a lot of people don't know he went by Mike Little Mike actually for most of his childhood, and even when he went to college, he was still introducing himself as Mike Little Mike. King was little because his dad was big Mike, and also because he was small. He was, you know, at maximum height, he reached five to seven, so he was he was. He skipped a couple grades, so, you know, elementary school, high school. He was two years younger than his classmates.
And he was short to begin with, so that might be why he grew the mustache as quickly as he could, as soon as he could.
Yeah, that reminds me.
I tell people all the time, you know, I'm not much taller than five seven myself. I skipped a gray. All the great leaders.
In the world are short, guy.
I mean, it's just yeah, me too. It's the only thing King and I have in common.
Yeah, at me too, as somebody who's six three and lean and handsome.
Yeah you're not even sixty three whatever whatever, at best six y two.
So John more about his childhood. This is something in the book that surprised me. Can you tell us about the premiere of Gone with the Wind and Little Mike's role in this premiere.
Yeah, this is fascinating. You know, the movie premieres and it's it's based off the huge best selling books. So this is a major event when the movie comes out. The biggest stars in Hollywood, Clark Gable is the.
You know, is the start.
He flies in on a special jet from Hollywood to Atlanta for the premiere and this is the biggest event that's hit Atlanta in ages. You know, Atlanta's trying to step out, trying to prove that they're a big sophisticated city, so they roll out the for Kate Oh man, you're gonna put me on the spot nineteen I think the film was.
Thirty nine. Yeah, so.
This is a great whitewashing of history, of course, because we're celebrating the plantation era, we're celebrating slavery, we're celebrating you know, this this vision that really cleans up a lot of the history. Right, But when it comes to Atlanta, Atlanta is just thrilled to have this thing, except maybe some people in the black community are not so thrilled because they see they're not allowed to go see the Hollywood premiere.
They're not They're not.
Invited except as servants to work at this great, big party that they're throwing for the premiere of the movie. And Daddy King's church, Martin Luther King Senior's church, is invited to perform at the opening. They still can't come in to see the movie, but they're invited to sing dressed as slaves standing in front of this mockup of
the Tara Plantation. And Daddy King accepts the invitation. A lot of black leaders in Atlanta are furious with him, saying that he should not be endorsing this this event. But Martin Luther King Senior, you know, has this complicated relationship with the city powers of Atlanta. He wants to be a fighter, he wants to stand up for civil rights, he wants to push for integration, but he also enjoys the fact that he has an audience with with white leaders,
business leaders, and politicians. So he gives permission for his church to appear at this thing, and his wife, Alberta King, leads the choir, and the choir is dressed in garments depicting them as enslaved people, and young Martin Luther King Junior age ten is sitting in the front row singing along.
Man, John, I want to thank you for telling us that that was great, powerful, And I want to follow up with something that Khalil said at the start, which is like how daunting it is to write a biography of King. You know, not only is he mythologized, but there's been a lot of other writing. And I'll just say, for my part, one of the ways that you kind of conquer this is just the writing is so damn good.
Yes, snap snaps over here, and.
Just you know, I'll think of one part, which is the nineteen sixty three March on Washington when King gives his most famous speech. I have a dream. Everyone knows this moment, and you tell this moment like almost through a prism. You've interviewed a woman who attended, and so you shift to her point of view sometimes, and you have a guard, this white guard on stage with King who's known only for like his hand moving the microphone.
But you've interviewed him, and so you're able to sort of pivot and create this prismatic, full on kind of like omniscient moment. It's really just amazing. Can you talk a little about about the actual archival research, the documents, the things that make this biography different than all the previous ones.
Yeah, you know, I went around the country and interviewed everybody I could who had any connection to King, and I found hundreds of people, lots of scores of people who actually knew King. And this is I figured the last chance to really run around and meet these people. And I've even before I thought about doing a book, I just thought, I'm going to travel the country.
And interview people who knew King.
And then I interviewed dozens of people who were at the march on Washington, as you said.
And I also had just a ton.
Of new archival material. You know, we have thousands of pages that the FBI has released just in the last few years. They keep issue releasing new stuff. And at the same time I found Martin Luther King, Senior's unpublished autobiography, I found maybe tens of thousands of pages at your old favorite haunt, Khalil, the Schomberg Library in Harlem. King's personal archivist L. D.
Reddick.
He was the official archivist for the for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and all of his papers were at the Schomburg unopened the boxes had not yet been opened, they had not even been cataloged.
Yet most people don't realize that biographies are essentially the life blood of biography are the documents. And here you've just given us a kind of an insider's perspective on what it means to crack open a new collection. But you also talk about the FBI records, and in some
ways they are the backbone of the book. You essentially say that these newest FBI records that have recently been released show definitively that King was not a tool, not connected to had nothing to do with the Communist Party
of the United States. And in fact, in exploring these FBI records, you come to an even more definitive conclusion that he was always couching his critique in the American dream, in this notion of a kind of constitution that had created the possibility for the nation to quote unquote live up to its promises.
Do I have that right? I mean, are we going to put this to bed?
Now?
Yeah, let's put it to bed. I think the FBI have put it to bed. The FBI knew that King had nothing, no interest in commune, and they knew that he was only using these You know, he had these allies who had communists passed because he was trying to build a more democratic American society.
They knew that all along.
They just couldn't deal with it because they hated him so much and because they by that point had him in their sights intent on destroying his reputation and breaking up you know, his works.
So yeah, so listen, this is this is a show that talks about the absurdities of race, built around an interracial friendship that's you know, almost forty years in the making.
And you are Chicago based author. But I'm always ribbing Ben about sort of his choices in life, and one of your choices is to focus on black men and these biographies you've written about Ali, So tell us, like, how did you, as a white writer, come to take such a great interest in these, you know, significant black figures in American history.
Well, since you guys go back and talk about childhood a lot and show, I'll have to do the same.
I mean, yes, I'm a little bit older than you guys.
I was born in sixty four, so I'm going to school and I can remember the first day of kindergarten. There are no black kids in my neighborhood. But I pull up to school and there's busses of white kids and there's buses of black kids, and my little six year old brain must have been going, Okay, what's going on here? And over time, you know, I just normalized it. I made friends all through elementary school and high school, and by the time I got to college, there were
African American studies classes available. I didn't realize that that was like a fairly new thing at the time, but I was excited and I grew up. Also, it's the seventies, right, so it's.
In the air.
Muhammad Ali is the most famous man on earth, and everybody's trying to figure out what he means in terms of race relations in America because he's calling it out, he's calling out racists, but he's also yucking it up on TV with Johnny Carson. So like, my little brain is trying to figure this stuff out. Good Time, Sandford and Sun like all of this is like, you know, it must have been something about that environment I grew
up in that's drawing me to these questions. So I think it developed organically because of the way I was raised and where I was raised and just what was in the culture at the time.
So you are a product of black studies.
Hallelujah.
See this is what happens. This is what happens white folks when you get exposed to black writers, black literature.
And black whole culture. Yeah, exactly, John, We're going to take a quick break and we come back. We're going to talk more about Martin Luther King as a complicated, actual living person. We are back on Some of my best friends are with Jonathan. I. You know, one of the things you've dug into all of these new FBI wiretaps that have been released, and they tell us something that we already knew. We knew that King had lots of affairs, but they tell it in much more detail.
We actually know who the affairs are with. We know the actual words that he said when he called these women. And I just like, I know, you don't really I know, you don't psychoanalyze King in this book, But this has been sitting with me and troubling me. And since I've
read the book, it's like, what was King actually thinking? Like, here's a guy who's in charge of this movement, and he's so busy and exhausted, and the stakes are so damn high, and he's he's undertaking like not like two or three affairs, like six and eight at a time. And there's like even in the language he's using with these women, there's like actual expressions of love of need, and I just don't really know, like what's going on? How do you make sense of that?
It's hard, It's really hard. You know.
We see this with a lot of powerful, famous men, this this need for attention, this need for constant gratification. And maybe, as Ralph Aberneth he said, it's a stress release because he's under such enormous pressure, and yet he knows that it's that he's risking everything. He knows that any day he could wake up and read this in the paper, because he knows the FBI is listening to his phone calls and why are tapping his hotel rooms
and leaking it to the to the press. So the strain he's under is just unbelievable, and you constantly ask yourself, why doesn't he just stop? Why does he keep subjecting himself to this risk? But you know, as Ralph Abernethy and others who knew him said, he couldn't it became a compulsion. And he did also have a lot of mental health issues. You know, he was hospitalized numerous times for what he called exhaustion, but you know, others close
to him called anxiety and depression. So I don't think it was a logical rational choice.
Yeah.
If King lived in a different time, he would have gone to see there's one of those sex addiction specialists like Eric eric Ay, the R and B artist. When who's cheating on halle Berry, you just go, you know
and talk to somebody to help work it out. I mean, I agree with Ben, we don't learn anything new, But not only is it humanizing, but it also you know, you can kind of see a struggle in this that there is something that feels like he's lost control of himself in this way because the risks are great, and he's constantly fretting about whether or not the movement can succeed based on the choices they make, and here obviously his personal ones are part of that risk analysis.
And John, I want to I want to ask you a follow up to that, which is, I'm curious, what new did you learn about Koreta Scott King? Like, what what's the what's your sort of new insight into her.
Well, first of all, I think she's a far greater hero than than she's been portrayed.
She was.
More of an activist than King was when they I think that's the main thing that attracted King to her. Of course, she was, you know, intelligent and beautiful, but she came with a pedigree for activism. She'd been at Antioch and involved in all these protests, and King was really attracted to that. And then, of course, you know, she gets shut down because of the sexism of the time and the sexism.
Of the church.
She's not allowed to be as activist as she wants to be. But she still pushes King all the way. When when King wins the Nobel Prize, Coreda is the first one that says that we have an even greater responsibility now to speak out not just on voting rights and integration, but on war and materialism and poverty. It's Kreta, really, who's you know, giving them a little nudge every step of the way. And yeah, she she certainly knew about his extramarital affairs, even though she denied it all of
her her life. But that to me makes her even more heroic. Because the FBI is trying to drive a wedge between King and Coreta, and she's just not going to let it happen.
Yeah.
One of the things that I took from your treatment of Caretta and these notes that she kept, is the extent to which King himself, who was criticized at the time by people in the movement, women in particular like Ele Baker, who helped to lead the NAACP and eventually the Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee, You basically show that King himself was a sexist. He didn't really value the voice of women in the movement, including his own wife.
Yeah, he had a serious blind spot there, as did many women. I mean, as did many men of that time, and certainly many Southern Baptist preachers.
People like Ella Baker.
Called him on it, and his own wife called him on it, and he wasn't He just wasn't there yet.
And John, what evidence is there or is there any evidence that the FBI fabricated or distorted what they found about King? You know, so they have actual tape. Did they make anything up about him?
Great question? So we have the transcripts of the tapes.
The tape themselves won't be released until twenty twenty seven, although I think some people are trying to suppress that from being released then. But the transcripts are accurate, according to everybody I spoke to who's on those tapes. Andrew Young has read the transcript he's on the recordings, and he says that his words are accurately transcribed. Bayard Rustin got ahold of his own FBI files and said the transcripts were accurate. So I don't think there's much doubt
when we read transcripts that they're accurate. But the memos are that summarize what's being heard in these hotel rooms are definitely open to scrutiny, and that, you know, we'll just have to see if and when those tapes are released in twenty twenty seven, whether the FBI was in fact embellishing some of what they heard in the memos.
Got it, got it well.
One of the things that the transcripts don't distort it in which drive a lot of your new ways in which you reveal the complexity, particularly of King's own doubts and frustrations, are the conversations he's having with his own own team. I mean, you just mentioned Andy Young actually reviewing the transcripts for accuracy. So talk to us a little bit about what more we learn in terms of the internal dialogue between King and his close advisors.
The FBI transcripts, to me are so important because we see how the FBI is trying to weaponize King's behavior against himself. That's what's most important about his about the tawdry details of his sex life, that our government is trying to weaponize it. But the other there's a there's a hidden benefit to these transcripts, and that's that we get this really intimate view of King on the phone
with his closest friends and advisors. We hear his doubts, we hear his concerns, we hear him suffering as he's saying that he feels like he's losing sway with the American public, that people aren't listening to him anymore. And then his own advisors are urging him, you know, stick with where you're good at, stick with where you're most effective, focus on voting rights in the South. And King is saying, no,
don't you understand me. His best friends don't understand that this this is about something bigger than voting rits in the South. This is about the Bible for him, and that he has to speak out about racism in the North. He has to speak out about segregation in the northern schools and about the war in Vietnam. This is what the Bible commands him to do, and his own closest advisors don't get it. And you could just hear his pain that he's feeling about this. It's really heartbreaking.
Yeah, that's really fascinating. I had a chance to meet Andy Young a few years ago. We actually did a panel together.
And it was a kind of retrospective there.
I saw it.
Yeah, Yeah, Ben was in the audience, and it was a kind of generational dialogue about like where do we go from here. The Charlottesville riot of twenty seventeen with the tiki torch mob down in Virginia had just happened a day or two before, and I remember talking to Andy after the panel discussion and he shared a moment that you actually have in the book.
It almost verbatim.
It may be that you had not talked to him long before that, but he said, you know, King's inner circle included James Bevel, who he said, and you right, was certifiably insane, and that King himself often wanted this kind of team of rivals around him, and that Andy Jung was always positioned as the most conservative, the most thoughtful, the most you know, deliberative, and these other folks around him were like, let's burn this shit down or let's
do this. You know, he said, you know, people wanted to get themselves killed the way they're behaving. And I'd love that you are able to capture some of that energy and uncertainty because so often these histories of social movements are so linear. You know, everything is foreordained, it's all looking back, and you really do capture the way in which in these moments they really don't know what to do, They really are unsure, and they are just taking risks and leaps of faith.
That's one of the things I love about King is that he's throwing himself into stuff where he doesn't know how it's going to turn out. He goes down to Mississippi and marches with Stokely Carmichael after the James Meredith shooting, and and and Stokely says, you know, I'm using you right, you know, like all this black power stuff sounds a lot more fiery when I'm standing next to Martin Luther King, and King says, yeah, it's okay.
I've been used before.
And you can actually see some of Stokely's philosophy sort of creeping into King's speeches. It's beautiful because he's because he's really a listener's and he's learning as he goes.
And that's Martin Luther King.
You know, you could just he could just be the He could just bigfoot everybody if he wanted to, but that's not his style.
Maybe one of the things this is well known, but reading the book made me think of it even more is that his career is essentially thirteen years. He dies at thirty nine. He sort of starts in organizing at twenty six, which is such a short amount of time. And maybe what you're describing there is not a middle aged person or an older person who's stuck in their ways, You know that we don't. We like to think of King,
because of his whole aura, as somebody who's older. But he's he's young still and he's still like it sounds like he's still learning all the time.
No question about that.
You know, he wanted to be a college professor, he wanted to maybe be a president, of university. He wanted to be like Benjamin Mays at Morehouse, given you know, inspirational lectures to the student body. I think he was always into learning, and he got thrust into this position of leadership, but it was not his first choice, and in some ways he wasn't really suited for it personality wise. He didn't ever really feel like the need to be
the center of attention. That was just not his not his vibe.
A man named King did not want to be King.
Yeah, and our greatest protest leader hated conflict.
So a last question about the FBI tapes. So much of what you just said, like we understand King through these tapes, and so I want to know how should we how we should understand the FBI, Like what is what's our government's role in the history of the civil rights movement in undermining the pursuit for equality.
Yeah, it's one of the most shameful chapters in our country's history that you know, we take this guy who I think should be on Mount Rushmore, one of the greatest heroes of American history, whose main mission is to try to make this a greater democracy, to live up to the words in the Constitution and our government can't can't handle that and attacks him and really tries to destroy him. A lot of it is based on racism.
Hoover was absolutely racist, but a lot of it is just also based on his seeing his job and not just him, but all of the power structure seeing their job is maintaining the status quo that we're in power, we want to stay in power, and sharing it with Black Americans is not really in our not to our benefit.
And j Edgar Hoover, you said Hoover, j ed Gar Hoover is the head of the FBI who just went after King relentlessly.
Yeah, he's the he's the main guy. But we shouldn't just blame it on him because LBJ was complicit. The Kennedys authorized the wiretaps, members of Congress knew about the surveillance, did nothing about it. The white media didn'tknew about the surveillance, did nothing about it. So Jane Hoover is a big part of the problem, but not the whole problem.
Yeah, And I just want to echo because I think as a historian, as someone who writes about this period, who teaches this period, we as Americans do not fully appreciate how central our own federal government was in destroying the promise of the Civil rights era and the black freedom movement more generally, like that, that is that just has to be said again and again and again, because the extent to which we always think about the white supremacists of the South and the KKK, or we think
about white moderates in there weak response to the possibility that unfold around them, which we're going to talk about, we still have to take ownership of the efforts of the most powerful law enforcement agency working against change.
I couldn't agree more.
And there was a moment in this book where I really got my blood started to boil. You know, I writing the scene of the march on Washington, and it's one of the most beautiful moments in American history. Literally feels like we're at a turning point, that America might.
Be ready to change. And you know, you've.
Got nationally televised millions and millions of people watching as black and white people are literally singing in harmony, holding hands.
And then the next day the FBI isshes this memo saying King must be considered the most dangerous man in America because he threatens status quo and That's just such a sad moment in American history because we had a chance to Really it felt like we had a chance, and the people who were there that day and even people watching it on TV felt like this could be the moment that we change, that we leave our are passed behind, and the FBI say no, no, We're not gonna do that.
Come on, that is a disturbing and also appropriate moment.
To take a break.
We are going to talk about what comes after the I have a dream speech, what comes after the civil rights achievements of nineteen sixty four and sixty five.
When we get back from a short.
Break, All right, John, I want to talk about King's popularity or lack of it, So you righte that, like in nineteen sixty three, babies all over the country are being named Martin, and by nineteen sixty six there aren't that many babies being named Martin. You also tell us that in nineteen sixty four there's this list of the most admired men in the entire WORL world and he's
right up there on the top of it. And then by nineteen sixty six is a survey and sixty three percent of those who were interviewed have a negative view of King. What happened? Why did he become so unpopular.
And so quickly?
So quickly?
For sure, he decided that he was going to say what he believed, and that was not a good move. You know, he was popular as long as he was criticizing Bull Connor in Birmingham. He was popular as long as he was talking about voting rights for people in Mississippi, because northern liberals could get behind that. But when he starts saying, you know, you northern liberals got a problem too.
You're fleeing the cities for the safe white enclaves of the suburbs, and your schools are just as segregated as the schools in Birmingham, Alabama. And when he begins speaking out against the Vietnam War, which was still relatively popular at the time, all these white Americans in the North in particular, are saying, wait a second, we thought you know, you were talking about those those.
Other racists of sticking white people right, stay.
In your lane. And even King's advisors are saying to him, you know, we might be more effective if we just focused on the South. And people can't understand even though you know the reason King becomes successful in the first place is because he's preaching this very mainstream view really in a way like, I just want us to live up to the democracy, to the promises of democracy and the Constitution.
I just want us to live up to the words in the Bible. We can all agree on that, right.
But when he when he starts getting specific and pushing it beyond the Deep South, suddenly people be it, get uncomfortable with that.
Yeah, and listen, So, John, you and I are in Chicago, and you talked about him. Him bringing this message up north. Chicago is one of his main destinations. So in nineteen sixty three there's this amazing school boycott in Chicago to protest segregation. Two hundred thousand and students leave public schools in Chicago to say, we can't have segregated schools any longer. We can't be taught in these like you know, buses
that are outside the schools, mobile mobile trailers. And King comes up and lends his support to that, and then he comes back up to Chicago and actually moves here with Correta to the West side of Chicago to highlight to protest housing issues here. He wants open housing nineteen sixty is open housing that you know, Chicago has such is in many ways the most segregated city in the country. And you know that there are all these restrictions on
where black people could live. They're not actually allowed to enjoy the open market of housing. Yeah, and he talks about finding racists here that are you know, would make people in Mississippi blush. Yeah. I mean even throw that to you, Khalil, because you know, what did you think of those moments? And you know when the story returns to Chicago.
Well, I've often had to disabuse young people, particularly my students, of this idea that we historians called Southern exceptionalism, because it is such a deeply conventional notion that the racism of yesterday was a Southern problem and that the issues in the North were really about ungrateful black people in their dysfunctional homes with fathers missing, who become welfare dependents and turn to pathology and gangs and all of this.
In other words, racism has been written out of most textbooks that teach this period of US history, and so I actually do think of it as a backlash moment because white liberals and moderates do have to confront doctor King's moral authority on their own ground, and they show their fucking asses big time, like you know, in a way that is very powerful even to this day, to see the venomous Confederate flag waving rage that we see
in video archival footage of the protest Engage Park, for example, Jonathan, which which you've written about.
Yeah, and you know, it's interesting what you're saying to Khlill is really powerful because we see the people throwing rocks and bricks at King Engage Park and that's famous. And King leaves here saying these these white people waving the Nazi flags could teach people in Birmingham about racism.
But the piece that we don't see and we don't talk about as much is the fact that King was getting all of the support from the northern suburbs, from the white supporters around on the periphery of Chicago and being invited to speak at churches and synagogues up there. But those folks weren't marching with them Engage Park. You know, they were comfortable sending their support their checks in the mail.
But when he moved to Chicago, he did not find the groundswell of support that he was looking for, and he also found divisions in the black community too. He wasn't able to rally the kind of backing here that he that he needed, in part because so many people here in the city were dependent on mayor daily for their jobs, and church leaders were divided to not all of the black churches got behind King in the way he had hoped. So it was he found and you know,
his advisors warned him, Chicago's a lot more complicated. The moral issues aren't as black and white, no pun intended.
It's going to be.
Harder to really focus the media on your message here because it's more nuanced. And all that played against him. But that having been said, you know, King really pushed for specific reforms. He got the city to agree to make, you know, important changes in laws and policies, and then once he left town.
The city just abandoned all that said. Yeah, don't let the door hit you on the way out.
You have a line and of what King sort of has this revelation about white people after coming north and he says they're all unconscious racists.
Yeah that hit heard, Yeah yeah.
And also the kind of language that today is had been completely removed from any notion of what King actually
stood for. You also tell the story of Mike Wallace telling a CBS audience in the summer of nineteen sixty six that white people were fed up with racial turmoil, which is, like, you know, the perfect both honest expression of what is actually happening and also an echo of the Reconstruction period, when white people were fed up with the racial turmoil of white Southern Democrats deciding that they were going to take back control of the South, and
the federal government deciding, you know what, the costs are too great, We're done with this, We're out, and so there we are. But King doesn't help himself, right, he doesn't help himself because with all of that, he adds insult to injury by saying this war in Vietnam is a moral abomination and unmitigatingly calls publicly calls for an end to the US involvement, and holds LBJ to task for escalating the war.
And what I love about that is that he's saying that the war is not just about you know, losing lives. It's not just about the fact that we're killing our brothers in Vietnam. That we're all children of God, He's saying that war has another consequence, that it leads to immortal rot in society, that it undermines all of the goodness that we're trying to teach. That you can't teach war, you can't advocate for war and still say that we are that we are committed to love and kindness and peace.
He's seeing the big.
Picture and in a way that you know, very few leaders are brave enough to call out.
Yeah, Okay, John, maybe you're already answering this question that I'm about to ask, but it's something I thought about reading the book, is whether it actually was a strategic mistake on his part to bring the Vietnam War also in to these major issues that he's trying to tackle, and King's own leadership is saying like this is a mistake.
Yeah, that's a great question.
And people are a lot smarter than I am, you know, like fired Russ and we're saying exactly what you're saying, that you're you're wasting your energy, that you're never going to accomplish all of these things that you're talking about. If you just focus on where your strongest, we can change the country. If we change if we get enough people registered to vote in the South. We change the balance of power in every state legislature, we change the
balance of power in Congress. We tip presidential elections, we start to see more black people being elected to office. All of that will will help us in the long run, and then you can start talking about you know, demilitarization and attacking materialism. But like lay the groundwork. That's how fired rust In, a brilliant strategist saw things. But King just couldn't do it. Like he said, you know, he wasn't a politician. He wasn't Machiavelli, and he wasn't thinking
about what made the most sense. He was thinking about what was the right thing to do. He was a you know, he was a minister primarily fundamentally.
Yeah.
Yeah, Well, I I'm fascinated by this issue too, and I don't think it's it's clear like in terms of political strategy. But what I have to say for me personally that I admire so much about doctor King is what you just said, John, that he wasn't a politician.
And when he tells the country that he's not going to support lbj reelection bid, it really strikes me as a moment when we saw kind of the last time that black leadership, organic black leadership, social media leadership was not captured by the Democratic Party that King maintained as independence in such a way that you cannot find today. You have people who are civil rights leaders, who are who are essentially an extension of the Democratic Party, and
I would say, for me, it has hurt us. And so one lesson coming out of this is that King's independence, even in the critique of Bayad Rustin, gets lost in what for that generation was a brass ring which was to participate in electoral politics, but it was also a devil's bargain because once you started participating, then you had debts to be paid, you had loyalties to protect, and I think that the independence of social movements have been lost in that translation.
That's a really interesting point. And when you think about what King was trying to do when he was assassinated was to pull together all of these factions in the Poor People's Campaign and to basically occupy Washington and force the nation to pay attention to all of the injustices. I mean, it's incredibly audacious and maybe by Ourdrustin would have said it was naive, but he was trying to find a way to do it. He wasn't just talking about it. He wasn't just writing op eds or.
Going on TV.
He was trying to build a new coalition.
I love that term occupy, occupy Washington, DC, because that's exactly what it feels like looking back on the promise of it. But let's talk just for a second about the enduring relevance of King. I mean, doctor King today is a symbol of American exceptionalism, and it seems to me, I mean, just certainly from my reading of your biography and the teaching that I do in the classroom that I mean, this guy is as relevant today and death
as he was when he was alive. I mean, was that a motivating factor even several years ago, not counting the madness of anti CRT and the misappropriation of King's content, of our character stuff that goes on now. I mean, how were you thinking about King's legacy when you first set out to do this biograph.
I started this book I think even before yeah, before Trump was elected. So, but there was so much in the air at the time that was was relevant. Obviously, because so much of what King had to say is still you know, ringing in our ears. You know, he called out not just racism, but income inequality and and incarceration, and he talked about reparations, he talked about police brutality. You know, the issues are still so alive. And at
the same time, I felt like, where's King now? We're not teaching his works, We're not you know, kids aren't reading him. I wasn't reading him in college. We've turned him into this really safe, watered down figure, and his life and his words don't bear that out. So I just felt like, especially when I was meeting people who knew King during my ALI work, I felt like we needed to hear his voice again. We needed a more intimate portrait of King. That was really what got me started.
So you just mentioned reparations and the Poor People's Campaign and the possibility that it held, you know, at the height of the apotheosis of King and his vision for the future of America. So what are some of the lessons that we should take from King's own commitment to this bold, challenging vision of a multi racial demid percy that was more egalitarian.
I don't know where to start on that one, Khalil, but I think the main message is that it's okay to be idealistic, it's okay to and it's in it's necessary to fight for what you truly believe in. And yes there's there's time and a place for compromise, but not everybody has to be a compromiser. I think King was pushing us to really fight for what we believed in, and in some ways the man who best recognized that was j Edgar Hoover. He truly recognized the threat that that posed.
Hmmm, yeah, that's something that Khalil Lexto always say that the backlash is so strong because the danger of multiracial democracy is real. One of the lessons that I took away from reading the book is what you talked about earlier, kind of a mission on King's part, which is overlooking
women in the movement. And you know, it's so clear that that women need to be part of the struggle going forward, and they were, they were diminished somewhat during his time, and so there seems to be like, when I think of the lessons for today, that seems to be part of it for sure.
Yeah, that's one of the negative lessons, and you know, we can see it. King missed out on a huge opportunity there, and everybody from Ella Baker to King's own wife was trying to wake him up to that, and he failed. And maybe if he'd lived longer, he would have come around and seen the light.
Yeah, well, you just used a word wake up, which it actually is a term that comes up in the very last sentence of the book. And Ben and I were joking about the fact that this notion of being woke right has become essentially criminalized in something like twenty states in terms of what it means to teach children the actual king, the radical king, the king who believed in a revolution of values, or even to teach about the FBI's Hitler.
Right, I'm the very last line of the book. Re read the line.
No, no, I'm going to I'm want to ask John, John, I'm going to have you say it.
Do you know the last line of the book?
I don't you do it?
All right? All right, find it. It's the very last line.
You got to read it are very Survival depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant, and to face the challenge of change.
Thank you for reading that. Were you thinking there. Even in writing that about sort of all the current attacks, I'm being called wokeness, like the anti wokeness movement from the right.
Yeah, that was that was a part of it. But the main point I think is that he's saying we have to stay alert and if you want to use the word woke, fine, but we have to be aware that that conditions always change, but our principles don't have to, and that we have to keep fighting no matter what
the conditions we're in. And if you're not, if you're so set in your way, is that you're not paying attention to the changes and you're not adapting to them, and you're not renewing your call and renewing your vision, then you're not going to get it done. Yeah.
Yeah, well that's encouraging.
Let's let's hope the book doesn't end up on any banned book list, so.
It might be good for some more people, you know, I do want it to be in everybody's hands.
Yeah, people who might Yeah, people who might not initially embraced King but could learn a lot from this book and can learn about our democracy.
Well, John, it was a true delight to have you on some of my best friends, are I learned some new things in reading your biography. I hope that our listeners pick it up and check it out as well. We're excited to see what comes next.
For you don't even ask oh, thank you guys man.
So John's book and maybe even more so, the conversation that we just had made me think about King differently. Okay, it made me think about King really as part of the complex history and politics of his moment, you know, like we often think about King or the fight for civil rights almost in kind of biblical terms, like you know, Moses getting the Israelites out of Egypt, and as you said, there was like this brass ring of fighting for voting rights.
But he was also just like part of history, like he had to think about the political moment, like there's a war going on, I gotta say something, and like there's a Democrat running for president LBJ, Do I support him or not? That's right to me. That's so interesting because it makes me think of like any leader today, you know, you know, do you support Biden his re election campaign? You know, do you talk about climate change? Also? Do you talk about immigration? Like everything is watered down?
And that's yeah, it's just a different view of King. It's a different way to think about him, and it's also what makes John's book unique.
I think, well, I think in general, biographies at their best capture the indeterminacy, the uncertainty, the emotional rollercoaster that leaders experience, and people who are involved in work that is disruptive, that is dangerous. And I love that in this conversation with Jonathan we were able to hear from him and of course, having read the book, just how much this new information draws our attention to these guys.
You know, they were all young. King was mostly you know, the late nineties and early thirties, I mean, unbelievable, right, So I hope that people pick this biography up. You know, this is a moment for revisiting this past that will help us hopefully see our way through the battles ahead.
Right right, Well, love you, Khalil.
Love you too.
Some of My Best Friends Are is a production of Pushkin Industries. The show is written and hosted by me Khalil, Jabon Muhammad, and my best friend Ben Austin.
It's produced by Lucy Sullivan. Our associate producer is Rachel Yang. It's edited by Sarah Nix with help from Keishel Williams. Our engineer is Amanda ka Wang and our managing producer is Constanza Guyardo.
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