The Daily Show: Ears Edition - Vann R. Newkirk II - Challenging the Easy Narrative of MLK in The Atlantic

Episode Date: January 17, 2022

The Atlantic's Vann R. Newkirk II discusses the magazine's issue challenging the typical narrative around Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement. Originally aired March 2018. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You're listening to Comedy Central. 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, Van Newkirk. Welcome to the show. 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 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 their their their their their their their their their their their their their their their their their, protect their, protect their, protect their, protect themselves themselves themselves, protect themselves, protect themselves, protect themselves, protect themselves, protect themselves, protect themselves, protect themselves, protect themselves, their, protect themselves, their, their, protect, protect, protect, protect, protect, protect, protect, protect, protect, protect, protect, protect, protect, protect, protect, protect, protect, protect, protect, protect, protect, protect, protect, protect, protect, protect, protect, protect, protect, protect, their, their, their, their, their, their, their, their, their, their, their, their, their, their, their, their, their, their, their, and, their, their, and then, their, and, and, their, their, andea, protect, andea, protect, protect, protect, protect, protect, protect, protect, protect, protect, protect, protect, protect, protect, protect get people, you give them guns and you give them guns so they can build a militia to protect themselves against tyranny.

And so you have teachers who are state agents, 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 a gun. For what? That's the tyrannical government. Yeah. I never thought of that as an idea.

I go, like, but you know, it's one. It's one of those ideas where people go, like, this seems 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 give my gun a gun. Yeah, you give your gun a gun. That's the most important, because guns don't kill people. People kill people. So if you give the...

So if you give a gun is ever a gun has killed a 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 even fathomed about Dr. King. And what that does as a whole is so many times, politicians bring up, or people who will have an agenda, bring up Dr. King, they quote the dream speech. They do the same thing, okay? He 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 his speech, his letter from Birmingham Jail, where he talks about the white moderate and nobody asks themselves, am I the white moderate? 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 the revolution, and 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 won, that we we won. And what I could never reconcile was how did we win if Dr. King was assassinated while protesting the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the to the to the the the the to the the the the the the the the to to to told told told told the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the told told told told told told told told told told told too too too tooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooeeeanananananededed. toe 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 derail. 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, in tears, and unrest and riots. And how you go from there to here in 50 years and say we won. How does it 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 50 years. So, so, 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? Education has risen, but our kids are now in schools that are as segregated as they were at 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

fan so I mean that's that's progress isn't it? Yeah Obama was 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 movement. This popular narrative of the civil rights movement too often relies on great men, the great men version of history, King, Malcolm X, Bergen 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 to to to to to acknowledge to acknowledge to acknowledge to acknowledge to acknowledge to acknowledge to acknowledge to acknowledge to to to to to to to to to to their their, their, their, their, their, their, their, their, their, their, their, their, their, their, their, their, their, their, their, their, their, their, their, their, their, the, the, the, the, the, the, their, the, their, their, their, their, their, their, their, their, their, their, their, their, their, their, their, their, th... We, th. Wea, tho, too, thea, thea, thea, thea, thea, their, their, their, their, their, their, their at home. Why do you think it's so important to acknowledge these women and what were the instrumental in doing in many movements? Yeah, I learned a lot reading that essay from Gene Dio 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 Coreta, right? He was going out and saying, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, tha, thi, thi, thi, thi, thi, thi, thi, thi, thi, thi, th, th, th, th, th, th, th, th, th, th, th, th, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, th, th, th, th, th, thi, thi, thi, thi, and thi, thi, and thi, and thi, that, and that, that, that, that, that, that, thi, thi, thi, 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 Coreta Scott King, not just as King's, the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the thii, thi, thi, thi, thi, thi, thi, thi, thi, thi, thi, thi, thi, thi was against thi was against thi was against thi was against was against was against was against was against was against was against was against was against was against was against was against was against was against was against thi was against thi was against thi was against thi was against thi was against thi was thi was thi was thi was thi was thi was thi was thi was thi was thi, thi, thi, thi, thi, thi, thi, thi, thi, thi, thi was thi was thin, thin, thin, thin, thin, thin, thin, thin, thiiiiiiiiiiiiiauiauiauiauia thi was against thi was against th read and how to learn and grow. So you look at, if you look at Coretta, Coretta Scott King, not just as Kings helped me. As someone who was an activist in our 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 the same the same the same same same same same same same same same same same same same same same same same same same, the same, the same, the same, the same, the same, the same, the same, the same, the same, the same, the same, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, toe, tooke, toe, toe, toe, toe, toe, toe, toe, toe, toe, toe, to, to, to, to, toe, to, toe, toe, toe, toe, toe, toe, toe, toe, to, to, to, toe, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, toe, toe, toe, their, their, their, their, their, their, theyy.e.e.e.e.e.s.s.a.s.s.a.s.a, toe.a, toe.a, toe, she built the same organizing structures that actually King relied on when he was doing the boycotts.

Wow. Those were built by black women against sexual assault. That's powerful. 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. 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-evasting. Right. The moral arc of the universe is always bending. Right. It's just thi. And we there. And we there. And we there there there there there. And we there there there there there there there there there there there there there there there there there there there there is there there is there there is there there there there there there there is there is there is always there is there is always there is there is there there is there is there is there is there is there is there is there is there is there is there is there is there is there is there is there is there is there is there is there is there is there is there is there is there there there there there there there there there there there there there there there there there there there there there is there there is th is th is thi thi thi thi thi thi thi thi thi thi thi. thi thi thi thi thi thi thi thi thi. thi thi thi. thi ththat the road is ever everlasting. The moral arc of the universe is always bending towards justice, and we bend it. So I think King would be protesting regardless of whatever situation is on the ground right now in America, he would be protesting because 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, 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. It's an amazing issue of the Atlantic. King. The special commemorative issue of the Atlantic is on Newstance now through May and you can go to the Atlantic. Southerty. To purchase a copy. Van Nuke, everybody. The Daily Show with Trevor the the the tela ears edition. to. to. to. to. to. to. to. to. to. to. to. to. to. to. to. to. to. to. to. to. to. to. to. Ears Edition. Subscribe to the Daily Show on YouTube for exclusive content and stream full episodes anytime

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