TDS Time Machine | How Not to Celebrate MLK Day

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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?

What you do today? Well?

Today we just Wills checked 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.

We're 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 y'all doing to celebrate MLK?

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 to 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 snippets through the World news.

And he didn't refuse.

That was Ruther 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 the children he loved them, So maybe you do not know?

Can we google it?

No?

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 all the black person.

You know, Edie Murphy, Barren left wing who left with Barren left in NFL is an offensive line?

Rouse everybody know him? Just making up names. So how you celebrate Martin Luther King?

Not too sure.

So that's what he died for, man, for you just to be out here just not doing nothing on this date.

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.

I take 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 right. Let's do what we want to do. That's day.

I'm fifty.

That's what I'm talking about. But still need lotion though.

For more on doctor King's legacy, we turned out to du say slow than everybody.

Don't say.

If if Martin Luther King were here, where do you think he would stand on the government shutdown?

I think he was staying inside because it's two damn cold. Why is Martin Luther King Day and the Coda's day of the year. I mean, why can't we celebrate them in July? And we can, you know, march outside and have a cookout.

But then it wouldn't be on his birthday.

Oh so a black man can't have two birthdays. It's twenty nineteen. Trump. I thought we'd moved past this.

What I didn't know there was a civil rights anyway? Never mind?

What okay, while you were indorsed today, what do you think and what are you remembering about doctor King's legacy?

You know what I want to remember the real Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, not the whitewashed Hallmark version, because every year people talk about the same stuff that I have a dream speech the March on Washington, how he had the voice of a Scooby Doo ghost. I have a dream, and I would have gotten away with it too if it worked for those meddling kids. But the

Whoa hold on, hold on. Even if that's true, I mean that he that he had affairs. Isn't it disrespectful to mention that on his birthday?

I don't think so. It's part of his legacy, a reminder that our heroes aren't perfect their people, And I'm not being disrespectful, just the opposite. MK was out there getting it.

And probably still could.

I mean, if you showed up on my bumble, I'd take him to the mountaintop in the Vadlone.

I've never thought of MLK on bumble.

Well, he wouldn't be on tender.

That man had class.

If everyone knew that fighting for civil rights could get you some a lot more people would fight for equality, equal pay, voting rights and whoever can stop black people from getting shot by the police for tonight.

Okay, I'll show up.

I'll show up, all right now, First you get a million in the streets, then you get a million in the sheets.

Still say, sloan, everybody, 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 and everybody?

Welcome boy, 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 tough way. So today, I'd like to show y'all some of my favorite mlkups, like this one.

The holiday didn't go as planned for some today. A business in Duluth, Minnesota created con troversy 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 lance.

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 is like commemorating Samuel L. Jackson Day by whispering. That's not what the ban stands for. It's not like in the middle of his mountaintop speech, Doctor King just broke off a number me with savings too insane to be believed. I might not get to that store. Much of my eyes are seeing the power of the discount.

Come on, Corretta, let's roll you know 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 man up.

As repaused to honor Doctor King.

This year, a flyer for a local event that bears his image is causing quite a stir, but its NBC twenty five's Walter Smith tells us right now, the party is now canceled.

The party promoters nowhere to be found.

This poster has a lot of people shaking their hands in disgust.

It shows doctor Martin.

Luther King Junior wearing a gold chain 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 would be no tworking. And then you know the strippers fly all over the place. And also how you go to photoshop Doctor King with gold chains 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 severe rights fresh from a 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 clob or whatever you want us to call you know, that'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 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. Juan Yeah, 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 Amendments. 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?

Yes, 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 it 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 people because guns don't kill people, right, people kill people.

What if it gives the killing guns?

I don't think a gun is a gun has killed a gun.

I saw that in the movie Once the Gun Shot, the gun and the gun. Yeah, 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 mythologized and oftentimes misunderstood, and it feels like you've captured that in

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, 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 on people who will have an 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 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 can 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

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 want that we want, And what I could never reconcile was, how did we win if doctor King was assassinated while protesting?

How do 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

How does it happen?

People would say, But then look at how much 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're 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 to bridge 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, Burgen, 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

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 Corea Coretta Scott King and how Martin's development politically came from conversation with Karretta. So a lot of what he was doing was sort of man's plaining 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.

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 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 words 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 us, 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 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 Explore more shows from the Daily Show podcast universe by searching The Daily Show wherever you get your podcasts.

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