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 Vann Newkirk.
(applause and cheering)
-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, uh,
racism in America,
the Second Amendment.
One of the more interesting,
uh, 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, uh, protects people
from the government. -Right.
The whole entire ethos of it is,
you get people,
you give them guns,
and you give them guns
so they can build a militia
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 'em guns.
-Uh, so, especially
in Florida... -Right, right.
You have a guy who was known
to use the "N" word
with his students,
and was suspended for doing it.
-You give that guy a gun.
For what? -Right.
-That's the tyrannical
government. -Yeah.
I never thought of that
as an idea. I go...
Like, 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..." -Right.
then I guess it means
no one has a gun."
-I don't know how it works.
-Well, I give my gun a gun.
-Yeah, you give your gun a gun.
-Yeah.
That's the most important...
'Cause guns don't kill people.
-Right. -People kill people,
so if you give the peo...
What about guns killing guns?
I-I don't think
a gun has ever...
A gun has killed a gun.
I saw that in a movie once.
-The gun shot the gun,
and the gun... -Yeah.
No one talks
about gun-on-gun violence.
(laughter)
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 this article.
Why did 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 Dr. King.
And what that does
as a whole is...
So many times,
politicians bring up,
or people who have an agenda
bring up Dr. King.
They quote the "Dream" speech.
They do the same thing.
Okay, you want 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, uh, his speech,
his
"Letter from Birmingham Jail,"
where he talks
about the white moderate.
And nobody asks themselves,
"Am I the white moderate?"
-Right.
-So nobody...
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 piece of it,
that connected with me
written by you.
In this... and it 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 a revolution,
and those assaults were
astonishingly successful."
-Yeah. -That's
an interesting point of view,
'cause 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,
-Right. -that we won,
that we... we won.
And what I could never
reconcile was, how did we win
if Dr. King was assassinated
while protesting?
How did we win
the civil rights movement,
how were we victorious
if while protesting
for higher wages for
sanitation workers in Memphis,
he was assassinated,
-Right. -and his poor people's
movement was derailed?
So, I always want
to revisit that point,
and so when I wrote that essay,
I was listening
to Nina Simone's song,
"Why (The King of Love Is Dead)"
-Right. -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.
-Right. -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,
in tears, in unrest and riots,
and how you go from there to
here, 50 years, and say we won.
How does that happen?
People would say: But, Vann,
look at how much progress
black people have made
since Martin Luther King.
Surely things
have gotten better.
Black people are 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 50 years.
-50 years?
-In 50 years.
So what are we
talking about here?
We're 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?
Uh... education has risen,
but our kids are now in schools
that are as segregated
as they were in 1970.
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, Vann,
so, I mean, uh,
that's progress, isn't it?"
Yeah. Obama was president,
uh, eight years,
and now will we ever have
another black president?
Will you ever have
 another president,
-is the question I ask.
-(laughter)
Um... 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-in the article.
"Women have been the backbone
"of the whole Civil Rights
movement.
"This popular narrative
of the Civil Rights movement
"too often relies on great men,
"the great men version
of history.
"King, Malcolm X,
Thurgood Marshall,
"Stokely 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,
hidden in plain sight."
That is a powerful narrative
that many people forget,
and that is Coretta Scott King
wasn't just a sidekick.
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
Jean D.O. Harris.
She was talking about Coretta,
Coretta Scott King,
and how Martin's development,
politically,
came from conversation
with Coretta.
So a lot of what he was doing
was sort of mansplaining
Coretta, 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, uh, 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
Coretta, Coretta Scott King,
not just as King's helpmate,
as someone who was an activist
in her own right,
you start looking at
just all these other women
in the movement who did so much:
Rosa Parks,
who was an operative.
We're 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.
-That's powerful.
-The same things, yeah.
So when you, 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."
Um, 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.
A 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
is-is always bending
towards justice, and we bend it.
So I-I think King would,
he would be protesting,
regardless of whatever situation
is on the ground right now
in America,
he would be protesting,
'cause that's what he does.
That's what an activist does,
they're always agitating.
And so that's what I want people
to take away from the magazine,
is that his activism
was always at agitating.
It was always moving forward,
and progressing.
And you see in the last year
of his life,
-before he was assassinated,
-Right.
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. -Thank you.
It's an amazing issue
of The Atlantic.
King. The special commemorative
issue of The Atlantic
is on newsstands now
through May, and you can go
to theatlantic.com/mlk
to purchase a copy.
Vann Newkirk, everybody.
