I would rather die on the highways of Alabama than 
make a butchery of my conscience.
Question: if you were around during the civil rights
movement, would you have supported Martin
Luther King Jr., our most celebrated
leader of the time? The answer probably
seems obvious, but there's a really good
chance that you wouldn't have approved
of him. And that's because our commonly
held ideas about Dr. King are watered
down, overly romanticized, and often
flat-out wrong. We often think that most
good people loved Martin Luther King when
he was alive, and sadly that wasn't the
case, right? Many, many people certainly
admired him, but the vast majority of
Americans were not. One of the things
that we've also missed is the ways that
Dr. King is talking about police
brutality when he's alive. "Something must
be done to end this kind of unnecessary
abuse of police power and what we see as
outright police brutality." We've often
heard critics of Black Lives Matter say
if Dr. King were alive today, he'd be
ashamed. "But all lives matter, it's not
that any life matters more than another.
That's the whole message, I think, that
Dr. King tried to present." Mike Huckabee
instructs the protesters in Ferguson to
be more like Martin Luther King. I
thought to myself, "Be careful what you
wish for," because in many ways the
Ferguson protesters were a lot like Martin
Luther King. Dr. King very much
understood the importance and need for,
sort of, the disrupting of unjust
conditions.
He was arrested 30 times over the course
of his life.
We're in the home of Dr. Martin Luther King,
and the only thing that I ask is that
they not take the freeways. Dr. King
would never take a freeway. Dr. King
would never take a freeway. It was just
astonishing.
The Selma to Montgomery march, that's on a highway!
Certainly, Dr. King saw segregation in
the South as a problem, but he also saw
segregation in the North as a problem.
"The many problems that exist here and in
all of our urban and rural communities,
for that matter..." In the letter from
Birmingham jail in 1963, he's talking
about the greatest threat may not be the
Klan, but the white moderate who prefers
order to justice. The fear and resistance
to Dr. King ran deep, well into the
offices of elected leaders and the FBI.
They're bugging and wiretapping his home,
his office, his hotel rooms. They see him
as potentially dangerous, potentially a
communist, or a communist sympathizer.
What is your reaction to the charges
made by J. Edgar Hoover? He called you the
"most notorious liar in the country," and
this is a direct quote. Yes, this is what
I understand. So if in fact Dr. King was
angry, criticized white moderates and
liberals, advocated for criminal justice
reform, and believed in civil
disobedience, why is it that we have this
overly warm and fuzzy idea of him, and
what purpose does that narrative serve?
Honoring Dr. King in the civil rights
movement is used to make us feel good
about ourselves as a country. We had a
problem, they shone a light on this
injustice, and we corrected it. Even when
President Trump goes to meet the Pope,
takes him first-edition writings
of Dr. King. So I wonder, how will history
remember people like Colin Kaepernick
and the activists of Black Lives Matter?
"I couldn't see another hashtag Sandra
Bland, hashtag Tamir Rice." I think we will
see a Colin Kaepernick Boulevard, similar
with Black Lives Matter. I mean, Black
Lives Matter fundamentally changed the
national conversation we're having, so
there's no question to me, in 20 years,
we're gonna look back on this as
necessary, as essential, as important,
as right.
Thanks for watching! If you enjoyed
that brief history, here's another one
about workplace sexual harassment
trainings, and how they've evolved over time.
