You're listening to Comedy Central.
Today is Martin Luther King Day, a day when America celebrates the legacy of one of its greatest civil rights leaders, and a day where black people get to cut in line at your potele At least that's my excuse. But what is Martin Luther King Day? And how should people celebrate it? While from more on this we turn to a man who has had many dreams that no one wants to hear about.
Where would you near? Everybody, Welcome by, Welcome, good.
To have you, good to see you, good to see your Mandela.
Look.
MLK Day is a special day for America, and it's a special day for me as someone who has been mistaken for Martin Luther King Junior many times. But as we get further and further away from his life, it's easy to forget what he was really about, which means sometimes people celebrate him in a really picked up way. So today I'd like to show y'all some of my favorite MLK cups, like this one.
The holiday didn't go as planned for some Today, a business in Duluth, Minnesota created controversy when promoting a sale in honor of the civil rights leader. The sign posted at the shop read MLK Day sale twenty five percent off everything black, but the owner says it was just misinterpreted. Twenty five percent off everything black.
He was black, he was proud, he looked good.
We were celebrating that.
Are you serious for Mlkday twenty five percent off of black clothes? What it should be is one hundred percent off of black people, free at last, free at last, pants, tops and coats of free at last.
Yeah.
Roll.
You know what makes it worse is that if you read doctor King's speeches, you'll see that like he was opposed to consumerism and wasteful capitalism.
That's right.
Celebrating MLK Day with a sail, it's like commemorating Samuel L. Jackson Day by whispering. That's not what the man stands for. It's not like in the middle of his mountaintop speech, Doctor King just broke off, remember me with savings too insane to be believed. I might not get to that store, which over my eyes are seeing the power of the discount. Come on, Corretta, let's roll.
You know what it actually it actually is unfortunate because it seems like some white people are out of touch with Doctor King's legacy.
Oh it's not just a white thing. In fact, Doctor King might actually be proud that on his special day, people of all colors and backgrounds have been packing up.
As we paused to honor Doctor King.
This year, a flyer for a local event that bears his image is causing quite a stir. But as NBC twenty five Swalder Smith tells us, right now, the party is now canceled, the party promoters nowhere to be found.
This coaster has a lot of people shaking their heads in disgust. It shows doctor Martin Luther King Junior wearing a gold Shane promoting a party called Freedom to Twerk. It was supposed to take place at this club, but it's been canceled. The owner says he's disgusted, and there'll be no twerking here.
There will be no twerking here. Sounded like Gandolf in a Tyler Perry movie. That will be no twerking. And then you know the strippers fly all over the place. And also how you go to photoshop Doctor King with gold change to try and make him look cool? He was already cool. Look at the look at these real pictures of doctor King from back in the day. Look at him playing pool in a suit and a several right fresh time of March. That shot so cool it
doesn't matter if he misses. And here he is making the library look cool, standing in front of books like a stack of money. But this, this, this is my favorite. Martin Luther King wearing sunglasses inside Trevor. He could have taken that call in private, but he left the door open for the haters. But maybe maybe the most popular activity on Mlkday is using his legacy to push your own agenda, and no one has done it in a more interesting fashion than this guy.
I believe that Gun Appreciation Day honors the legacy of Doctor King. And the truth is, I think Martin Luther King would agree with me if we were alive today, that if African Americans had been given the right to keep in bear arms from day one of the country's founding, perhaps slavery might not have been a chapter in our history.
Okay, okay, hold up, I'm pretty sure on doctor King's list of priorities given slaves, guns comes way below not having slaves in the first place.
The logic, the logic makes no.
Sense, This makes no sense.
How would you do that?
Like, dude, do you think the slave owners would have just had a little chit chat? Well, shit, we set them free. Oh no, them set them free. Let's make it interesting. Give them shotguns.
Now.
I will say this, if slaves did have guns, the movie Roots would have only been fifteen minutes long. Your name is tobal Oh whatever you want us to call you know, it's cool?
Cool? Okay, look, sir Roy.
We've seen people mess it up, you know, with sales or you know, with their own agendas. But what is the proper way to celebrate doctor King's legacy?
Listen, man, It's simple. MLK was for racial equality, economic justice, and stood against the exploitation of the poor. And he did so because he knew that one day, our great nation would rise above bigotry, injustice and poverty. And on that day, my friends, there will be twerking for everyone everywhere.
Where? Would you and everybody?
Since The Daily Show finally hired a black host, we can properly celebrate Martin Luther King Day by asking New Yorkers how they celebrate his legacy. Shut up, don't interrupt me on Martin Luther King Day.
That ain't cool. So let's do this. Do y'all know what today is? We're lost? We're lost day. Do you know what day it is?
Today?
Monday? What you do today? Well, today we just woke up, stecked out of our hotel.
Hotel, we're going to go get coffee and we're gonna walk around.
So which one of those celebrates Martin Luther King Day?
Well, none of none of what we've talked about.
Who's starting to do? What's up for Martin? So this ain't reparations? But this is enough. That's right. Give me one hand once? Yeah, what'll do to celebrate? Emaka came to New York? Came to New York. That's it. That's all y'all gonna do. Want some shows, ate some food, did some shopping. All right.
I'm gonna come back y'all on Juneteenth, and y'all better have done better.
Don't you like?
When he, like you know, refused to move to the back of the bus.
I can remember it, shippis through the world news and he didn't refuse.
That was Ruth of Parks.
Name famous MLK quote?
And what does he.
Say after that? I'm not sure I name a famous MLK quote. Besides, I have a dream besides one million ballance, and you could tell me something else that Martin Luther King said.
He told his children he loved them, So.
Maybe you do not know?
Can we google it?
I have a dream that one day, that's all I got.
I have a dream that one day white people will actually know what's in that damn speech.
Okay, just name five black people. Eddie Murphy, that's only black person.
You know, Eddie Murphy, Barren left wy Lituid, Barron leffl is an offensive line out.
Everybody know him.
You're just making up names. Yet, So how you celebrate Martin Luther King? Not too sure. So that's what he dies for. Man, For you, this would be out here just not doing nothing on this day. No, I'm just kidding.
You can do whatever you want.
Man, we're gonna go see the lion king. Okay, just got king in.
I mean, that's as close as you can get.
The freedom and liberty will go about and do what we want to do.
That's our celebration.
See, that's that's a call from a black woman right there.
That's why she earned. That's what we want do.
That's I'm fifty, That's what I'm talking about.
Still need.
My guest tonight is an amazing writer at the Atlantic who helped produce a special commemorative issue of the magazine called King, a look at the life and legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Please welcome Vanu Kirk. Welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me.
Man.
I've been a fan of your writing for so long. You touch on so many different topics, you know, from black panther through to racism in America. The Second Amendment. One of the more interesting conversations that I got started because of your writing was specifically about teachers being armed, and you argued that in its very essence, it goes against the Second Amendment.
Why would you make that argument?
Yeah, So the Second Amendment is supposed to be this thing that protects people from the government. The whole entire ethoughs of it is you get people, you give them guns, and you give them guns so they can build the militia, but to protect themselves against tyranny.
Right.
And so you have teachers who are state agents, right, paid by the state, who are taking care of our kids, who have sometimes done bad things to those kids, and you're giving them guns. So, especially in Florida, you have a guy who was known to use the in word with his students and was suspended for doing it. You give that guy gun.
Right, that's the tyrannical governments. Yeah. I never thought of that as an idea.
I go, but you know, it's one of those ideas where people go like, this seems like a good idea because everything leads to more guns. You go like, just give the people more guns, and then it solves the guns because if everyone has a gun, then I guess means no one has a gun.
I don't know how it works.
I'll give my gun a gun.
Yeah, you give a gun a gun. That's the most because guns don't kill people, right, people kill people.
What if it gives a killing guns?
I don't think a gun is a gun has killed a gun. I saw that the movie Once the Gun shot, the gun and the gun. No one talks about gun on gun violence. You have an interesting way of looking at the world, and this issue of The Atlantic, I think looks at Martin Luther King from so many different places and through so many different lenses, which I really
found interesting. Martin Luther King is one of those figures in America that I've always felt is mythologize and oftentimes misunderstood, and it feels like you've captured that in this article. Why do you think it was necessary to have an entire article about Martin Luther King Jr.
So what we want to do is challenge people, you know, we want people to read every single article in this issue and come away thinking about something new, right, something they had never thought about, something they never even fathomed about doctor King. And what that does as a whole is so many times politicians bring up of people who will have agenda, bring up doctor King. They quote the dream speech. They do the same thing. Okay, he wants us to live in a colorblind society where our kids
can go to school together. They quote this one part, but they don't quote the part about him being against the Vietnam War. They don't say his speech his letter from Birmingham Jail where he talks about the white moderate, and nobody asks themselves, am I the white moderate? So everybody now is pro King and not racist, but nobody's reading King now for how to be anti racist.
It's interesting that you say that because there was a specific article or a piece of it that connected will be written by you in this and there was specifically about the idea of Martin Luther King and his assassination. And you say here, in the official story told to children, King's assassination is the transformational tragedy in a victorious struggle to overcome. But in the true accounting, his assassination was one of a host of reactionary assaults by a country
against the revolution, and though those assaults were astonishingly successful. Yeah, that's an interesting point of view because many people feel like Martin Luther King being assassinated was the beginning of the great journey that got black people to where they needed to be. And you're arguing that it ended a revolution that was starting.
How do you prove that or why do you believe that?
So?
I remember when I was in school and I had a teacher who told me straight up that the civil rights movement was victorious, that we won, that we we won. And what I could never reconcile was, how did we win if doctor King was assassinated while protesting? How did we win the civil rights movement? How are we victorious if while protesting for higher wages for sanitation workers in Memphis he was assassinated and his poor people's movement was derailed,
So I always want to revisit that point. So when I wrote that essay, I was listening to Nina Simone's song Why the King of Love Is Dead. She wrote it three days after he was assassinated, and she's talking about will the country stand or fall? She's talking about a country that seemed then on the verge of an apocalypse.
And so I really wanted to go back to that moment and see how we get from that moment where you're talking about the end of the world, the Black community in shambles and tears and unrest and riots, and how you go from narrative here in fifty years and say we won.
How does that happen?
People would say, but van look at how much progress black people have made since Martin Luther King.
Surely things have gotten better. Black people on the up in America.
Well, some studies are showing that that may not be the case. So we've got some studies out from the Economic Policy Institute that are saying that black wealth, black home ownership rates, segregation in schools haven't gone anywhere in fifty years. In fifty years, so what are we talking about here? And we talked we were saying that the gap between blacks and whites now in terms of wealth is just so staggering that it's how do you even
build policy that gap? Education has risen, but our kids are now in schools that are as segregated as a word nineteen seventy, So what are we talking about?
That's an interesting point of view.
And I guess I know a lot of people argue back on that, and they'll say, well, I mean Obama became president, fan, So I mean that's progress, isn't it.
Yeah, Obama's president eight years? And now will we ever have another black president?
Will you ever have another president? Is the question I ask.
Here's something that I really connected with. And I guess because of South Africa's history, and also because it is International Women's Day.
Is this beautiful quote in the.
Article women have been the backbone of the whole civil rights movements. This popular narrative of the civil rights movements too often relies on great men, the great men version of history King Malcolm X, Spergan, Marshall, Stokey, Carmichael, other names you know, and it ignores the importance of women who also organized and led the movement and shows how their contributions have been sidelined and hidden in plain sights.
That is a powerful.
Narrative that many people forget, and that is Scott King wasn't just a psidekick.
She wasn't just the woman at home. Why do you think it's.
So important to acknowledge these women and what were they instrumental in doing in many movements?
Yeah, I learned a lot reading that essay from Gene Deo Harris. She was talking about Koretta Coreta Scott King and how Martin's development politically came from conversation with Koretta. So a lot of what he was doing was sort of man's planning. Kretta right, he was going out and saying, Okay, she was against the Vietnam War years before he was.
Wow.
She when they were courting each other and when they were still dating, she was the one who was sort of giving him these economic ideas, passing him along text about what to read and how to learn and grow. So you look at if you look at Karretta Coreta Scott King, not just as Kings helped me, as someone who was an active is in her own right, you start looking at just all these other women in the
movement who did so much. Rosa Parks, who wasn't operative, were taught in school that she was a tired old lady who sat down.
She was out there.
She built the same organizing structures that actually King relied on when he was doing the boycotts. Those were built by black women against sexual assault, the same things.
Yeah, And so when you look at these stories, how do you think it plays out? Because Martin Luther King exists in a place where some people use him to stage a protest and others go, we should use him to sell trucks.
In America, everyone sees him in a different light.
If Martin Luther King were around today, from what you have read and what you've learned, like, how happy do you think he would be? Would he think people have reached a mountaintop?
I think from reading him, his thing was never being satisfied with where we are, because there's always space. The mountaintop in that speech wasn't the place where we need to be in terms of race. The mountaintop was having the vision to see where we needed to go. And I think that vision was that the road is ever everlasting, the moral arc of the universe. It's always bending wards justice and we bend it. So I think King would he would be protesting regardless of whatever situation is on
the ground right now in America. He will be protesting because that's what he does. That's what an activist does. They were always agitating, and so that's what I want people to take away from the magazine is that his activism was always agitating. It was always moving forward and progressing. And you see in the last year of his life before he was assassinated, he sat down and thought, how
do I move this forward? And he came forward with the most ambitious program to fight poverty, to fight militarism, and to fight racism across the globe.
And that was King. That was King. It's an amazing article. Thank you so much for being here. That's an amazing issue of getting a King.
Explore more shows from the Daily Show podcast universe by searching The Daily Show wherever you.
Get your podcasts.
Watch The Daily Show weeknights at eleven ten Central on Comedy Central and stream full episodes anytime on Fairmount Plus.
This has been a Comedy Central podcast show.