[Melissa Harris-Perry] When we think about King as human and not divine, when we think about him as strategic
and not morally unassailable, he becomes more available to us and I actually think he becomes
more useful to us as a organizing tool, because his imperfections didn’t change the fact
that the altered the course of American history. So we need not be perfect before we engage
in altering American history. Martin Luther King Jr. is a, is a human person, but that’s not
who we typically are acknowledging and remembering at this moment in our history. We are remembering
Martin Luther King Jr.,  "The Thing", "The Entity", "The Movement", "The Symbol", and that, that Martin
Luther King Jr. is a collective effort. He is both created in his moment and then recreated
and reimagined in every historic epic that follows. The genius of King was in part about
his ability to inspire, support and translate
existing movements. There is no point in which
navigating political interest and identities
is not difficult. When you are trying to build
coalitions, you have to be willing to recognize that you may be making a mess of other people’s
stuff. You should inject the question of diversity away from bodies and onto ideas, because it’s
ideas that, that change people across time.
[Student] I’m a son of an immigrant, first generation American .
[Melissa Harris-Perry] There is no elite University in the United States of America that has figured out race. The value of how Universities engage
with questions of race and with questions of gender and with questions of sexual orientation is that the thing that we are most supposed to
value here is the quality of ideas. And if, if
the most valuable thing is the quality of ideas,
there’s at least the possibility of moving
towards a sort of grander equality. I think
the man who we know as King is in fact deeply influenced by the work of women who supported
him, sometimes, who challenged him at other times, who critiqued him, who suffered, who
mourned him, and who undoubtedly carried on the work of King after he was gone. Ella Baker
believed that people already had their own answers and that the job of a leader was
to get them to get to know that they already had their own answers. She kept telling him,
“Don’t go tell the people what to
do. Go ask the people what they want you to
do.” There are, however, women who confront: Elizabeth Eckford, one of the Little Rock Nine gets separated
from them and therefore finds herself walking a gauntlet into Little Rock High School. But it is Elizabeth Eckford
in this moment of this kind of quiet endurance of racist rage which becomes, I think, the standard for heroic
resistance. That is what the civil rights movement is supposed to look like; you enduring this sort of hatred. And
it underscores a certain kind of belief within the context of the Civil Rights movement that undeserved
suffering is redemptive, which brings us back to King, in all of his imperfections. In all
of his imperfections, what King taught us
at our core is what a democracy really is.
The legacy of King is the reminder that when we live in a democracy, we have a right to
govern, not just to be governed, to rule not just to be ruled, to be heard not silenced,
and to lose without the fear that winners
take all. King told us that almost always,
the creative dedicated minority has made the world better. Look carefully at that picture.
It is easy to see the just King, the counterman, and the policemen. Look carefully at the picture.
Don’t ever fail to see the women standing next to King.
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