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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. On this Martin Luther King Day, let's begin with two historical soundbites, and one from this weekend with a little bit of context. 1963 was the year that Dr. King gave his famous "I Have a Dream" speech. That was at the big March on Washington in August of that year, an important moment, obviously, that helped in the progress toward the landmark civil rights act of 1964. It was a few months yet before President Kennedy would be assassinated, and the pressure was really being placed on him to get more active about civil rights legislation as well as on Congress.

Dr. King's line about judging people by the content of their character has been widely quoted, over-quoted, and even distorted to mean color shouldn't be taken into account when addressing racial injustice. His belief in non-violence has been widely reduced to exclude the fact that he was carrying out forceful non-violent acts of civil disobedience because he was a non-violent change agent, not just a passive asker.

For many people, the text and speech that deserves at least as much historical spotlight as "I Have a Dream" was the one from just a few months earlier in the spring of '63 when King was in jail in Birmingham, Alabama, for leading non-violent civil disobedience there. Here is Dr. King, reading from his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, citing a particularly painful moment that a southern parent might have faced.

Martin Luther King: When you suddenly find your tongue twisted, and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television.

Brian Lehrer: King's words from 1963 before "I Have a Dream". It's a lesson because, from today's perspective, it seems obvious to most Americans that an amusement park or any other private business should not legally be able to ban people on the basis of their race. Here's another historical clip from back then of South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond opposing civil rights legislation. This is from the same year, 1963 in a debate with Senator Hubert Humphrey on CBS television. As you'll hear, Thurmond twists the idea of government guaranteeing equal treatment to government telling private business what to do.

Strom Thurmond: It empowers the national government to tell each citizen who must be allowed to enter upon and use his property without any compensation or due process of law as guaranteed by the Constitution. This bill would take away the rights of individuals and give the government the power to decide who is to be hired, fired, and promoted in private businesses.

Brian Lehrer: Strom Thurmond in 1963, when he was still a Democrat, seeing racial equality as unconstitutional. A few years earlier in 1957, if you don't know this history, he had filibustered in earlier weaker Civil Rights Act by speaking continuously on the Senate floor for just over 24 hours. It was one of the most famous uses of the filibuster but by no means the only one against equal rights. The landmark Civil Rights Act passed in '64, only after a filibuster by West Virginia Democrat Robert Byrd, and by the way, it was broken because Senate Republican Leader Everett Dirksen rounded up enough GOP votes to end it and move the bill forward.

The final speech in opposition to that bill was given by Georgia Democrat Richard Russell, who had once famously said during a six-day filibuster that he had led against the Civil Rights Bill way back in the 1930s. The quote was that he was "Willing to go as far and make as great a sacrifice to preserve and ensure white supremacy." He just said it out loud, white supremacy, "in the social-economic and political life of our state as any man who lives within her borders." Filibuster has a long history of being used against civil rights, and yet, by the way, they later named one of the main Senate office buildings after Russell.

After the 1964 Act passed, as many of you know, some of you may not, things changed for the two political parties. Strom Thurmond switched parties and became a Republican. He chastised the Democrats for having, "Forsaken the people to become the party of minority groups, forsaken the people to become the party of minority groups." I guess he didn't consider members of minority groups people. Ever since that moment, Democratic presidential candidates have never again won the majority of white voters as they had before. They've averaged only 40% starting with the 1968 presidential election.

Maybe it's no surprise, and maybe it's not just about Donald Trump, that Trump used Martin Luther King's actual birthday on Saturday, not to give a speech about civil rights or the 10 to 1 ratio of wealth that whites continue to have compared to Blacks, or the disproportionate death and misery toll that COVID has taken on Black Americans compared to whites, instead of used King's birthday, like Strom Thurmond might have to portray whites in America as the racially aggrieved party by stating this falsehood about how COVID treatments are distributed.

Donald Trump: You get it based on race. In fact, in New York state, if you're white, you have to go to the back of the line to get medical help. Think of it. If you're white, you go right to the back of the line.

Brian Lehrer: That of course is false. The truth that he was twisting as fact-checked by multiple news organizations is that because of the socio-economic history that has led Black and Latino Americans to be statistically at greater risk for serious effects from COVID, race is listed as one risk factor to be taken into account when determining courses of treatment, but Trump sees a meaningful percentage of the white public ready to believe on King's birthday, that they are the ones who need more rights today, as he prepares to potentially mobilize as much of the white vote as he can for 2024 and for his candidates in the midterms this year.

With all of that as prelude two clips from 1963, one from this weekend that shows history is a continuum, we welcome Kai Wright host of the WNYC podcast and Sunday night calling show the United States of Anxiety. Hi, Kai. Welcome back to the show.

Kai Wright: Hey, Brian. You fairly well laid it out there. [chuckles] A fairly striking set of background.

Brian Lehrer: As a matter of history, first Strom Thurmond switched parties and took a lot of white America with him. The civil rights of 1964, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, was not just a human rights turning point, it was a real political turning point in this country, wasn't it?

Kai Wright: Yes. I'm glad you gave that stat about who has voted for what, as President over the years since then. I would just slightly twist the framing, it not the Democrats haven't won white voters, white voters have refused to vote for a Democrat in a majority since the 1964 Civil Rights Act, including Barack Obama. There is a real fog of memory even shortly over how much he proved about how we're past race in our country. A majority of white voters did not vote for Barack Obama in either of his elections.

It's also a reminder of something else from history is that how quickly mainstream opinion, which is to say, white opinion, turned against civil rights in general, following both the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. It was a very quick pivot to say, "Hey, lots going on here. Let's slow this down." There was a brief window of support, and very quickly they turned against these ideas and against King, that's another thing we forget. He was not popular in his lifetime.

Particularly, you quote the letter from a Birmingham Jail. The point of that letter the core of that letter was that liberal whites, moderate whites, self-identified moderates were telling him, "Chill out, slow down. Quit," asking for so much so fast. His rejoinder, was, "We cannot wait. We cannot continue to wait." It was a big turning point in that it was a moment in which white America said, we cannot broke this much change this fast, and we're still recovering from that.

I'll say one more thing, is that it was a big turning point for democracy because the Voting Rights Act was remarkably successful. This was a remarkably successful piece of legislation. Arguably one of the most successful laws in our history. Democracy expanded wildly from 1965 through until quite recently, it launched an era of just rapid and sustained expansion of democracy in America of the sort that we had not seen since right after the civil war.

Brian Lehrer: I want to focus on that and dive a little deeper since the Voting Rights Legislation that's up before Congress right now is obviously the front and center issue on this King day in 2022. It's interesting to hear the rhetoric of Strom Thurmond and in the context of before the basic civil rights laws were passed and how similar it is to some of the rhetoric today, where he says, it's about government telling you what to do, and he doesn't even get into the equal treatment aspects of it.

One of the things I referenced in the intro is that I think the vast majority of white Americans today would agree that it's unconscionable for an amusement park to take the example in the Dr. King clip to say, you can't come in because you're Black. It's completely unacceptable today. You probably get 95%, tell me if you disagree. I think you'd get 95% or something like that white agreement that we shouldn't go back to something like that and yet some similar languages used to block advancement toward more equality in real life, not just on paper.

Kai Wright: I think I would agree. You'd get 95% white agreement though it is worth noting we live in an enormously segregated society even today. What we say versus what we do in modern times, our actions might be a little closer to the past.

I'd say, one of the things that's important there is Strom Thurmond was not only saying be aware of the government telling you what to do. He was saying, "Be aware of the government, telling you what to do with your property," which is an important piece of it. This was another thing that is scrubbed from King's legacy. His core message was the problem with the United States where we have a corruption in our values is this triple evil of materialism, racism and militarism.

He used this phrase a thing oriented society that was our core problem. We had this thing oriented society that placed property over people, property over human rights, property over community and that was a core part of what he wanted to address. Of course, that idea of placing property over humanity goes back to slavery, that's the core idea there, was that we have property, it is in these people and we have to defend our property rights. That has been in the core of a part of American politics since slavery and that you heard it in that Strom Thurmond quote, and you hear it quite often today.

It is in people's minds, divorced from that history because again, part of the political project of white supremacy is to a race history, but so it's a divorce from that history, but that thing oriented society, that is a big part of what we faced then, what we face now and what king wanted us to think about.

Brian Lehrer: On a racing history, I read it over the weekend and I didn't get to read deeply into it so I don't know how far this goes, but I read over the weekend that the new Republican governor of Virginia Glenn Youngkin, who ran against the teaching of critical race theory as one of the major planks of his campaign has now banned the teaching of critical race theory in the state of Virginia.

I don't know what that means. I don't know how you can ban the teaching of an academic theory that pertains to the law like you can't mention that theory in class, but it-

[crosstalk]

Kai Wright: Particularly [crosstalk] being taught in the first place.

Brian Lehrer: There is that little little exception, but it goes to what you were just saying about resistance to learning too much about history that's uncomfortable.

Kai Wright: This, again brings us back to king, his analysis that we forget, that the key purpose of white supremacy and white identity politics in general which is what we're talking about is white identity politics is to distract the white masses from their own deprivation that was a core idea he had. It involves a lot of gaslighting, the gaslighting essential to the project and King wanted us to see that. He wanted us to see that we have this corruption in our national soul, because we're so often-- because there's these autocrats telling us that up is down so often and we have to be able to free our minds from that.

That's also what you hear in the Trump quote that you played at the start of the show about this lie that there is reverse racism in the COVID response.

Brian Lehrer: He said white people in another part of the clip. How much could we actually stomach to air? He actually said white people are being denied vaccines. There's no white people being denied vaccines, it's just a lie. Kai, what's so troubling to me about it is that he must think that there's an audience that's big enough to matter politically, ready to latch on to that lie, that lives on the lip of white grievance.

Kai Wright: There is and there always has been. First off to establish you said it, but to reestablish the facts here, the white vaccination rate far outpaces the Black and people of color vaccination rate in New York state, which is what he was talking about. We also know about the disparity in deaths and illnesses racially that we have seen throughout the pandemic. This is the problem that public policy needs to solve.

I'd say, we're in this interesting moment now, currently in our history where traditionally liberals in the post-civil rights era tried to solve these problems of racial disparities without naming them, because naming them as we saw in 1964 inevitably leads to making white people feel like they're going to lose something. If public policy tries to solve the racial disparities born out of the history of racism and segregation, it is very easy to make white people feel like they're going to lose something in the process and so liberals have traditionally avoided naming it.

We've entered an era that we've been in one of these eras before, but we are in an era where people where racial justice advocates are saying, "I don't care, we're naming it. We are saying, in fact, white privilege must end and yes, that is something you must lose because it is deadly to everybody yourselves included." When King said things like that and became insistent upon it, you had a backlash then, what Nina Simone called the backlash blues.

We are in a moment of backlash blues because there is a vocal part of society that's saying white privilege must end and that's something you're going to lose and we don't apologize for it. That's the tension we're in. Donald Trump, and those who traffic in white identity politics have weaponized that. They know they can weaponize that, but what do you do?

I think then it begs the question politically, like, "Do you return to," as some have argued, that the road to defeating Trumpism is that liberals, people who oppose it and specifically democratic parties should go back to not naming race. That when you name it, you set him up for this backlash. I think our history tells us that one way or the other white identity politics is going to ride, and you're either going to have to face it or not.

Brian Lehrer: We're going to play another Dr. King clip from the letter from the Birmingham jail that's instructive to that point shortly, but listeners with Kai Wright, host of the WNYC podcast, and Sunday night, six o'clock calling show, the United States of Anxiety. We're also going to get into how Martin Luther King is taught in schools and how much that's changing.

Listeners, here's a specific invitation for you for the coming minutes of this segment. How did you learn about Martin Luther king in school? Or teachers how do you teach about Martin Luther King today? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. How did you learn about Martin Luther King in school? No matter what age you are or teachers, how do you teach about MLK today?

212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692 or anything about the politics of yesterday or today as relevant to this national holiday, as we're talking history and current affairs, Kai and me and you if you want to join us 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692 or tweet @BrianLehrer.

Kai, let's get back to voting rights because that's front and center right now. In 2013, the Supreme Court overturned. This is more recent history, but I still think a lot of people don't know this and couldn't name this. If you just ask them, say, "What happened with voting rights? Why are we having this con-" In 2013, the Supreme Court overturned the part of the Voting Rights Act of 65 that had required ongoing justice department approval over voting law changes in states, likes South Carolina, where Strom Thurmond had come from, and Georgia where Richard Russell had come from.

The court said in 2013 that it was wrong to base that requirement forever on things from decades ago. Kai, my question is, we have seen big turnout elections, like the 2020 election when Biden won Georgia and the two Democratic Senate candidates famously won Georgia largely because of big turnouts by Black voters. Has the Supreme Court decision had any real discriminatory impact in your opinion or observation?

Kai Wright: I think it's quite starkly clear that it's had this massive impact. Just, if you look at the number of voter suppression laws that have passed since then, it gave license to the states to begin passing laws that are moving at a record pace. 19 states passed laws last year, dozens and dozens of bills to restrict access to voting. There are many more in the pipeline. There are those who argue that that is a greater wave of democratic restriction than we have seen since Martin Luther King's days.

I think it's helpful to just again, think about the sweep of history in this tug of war over democracy. I think really go all the way back and I hope I get these stats right. In Mississippi, I think it was, in one Southern state. Now I'm not even going to remember the state. Following the civil war during reconstruction, there was 66% Black voter registration in the years following the civil war. We don't think about that. 66% Black voter registration, that same state. I can't remember the Southern state, I'm sorry, but by the time we got to just before the Civil Rights Act, there was 4% Black voter registration.

Democracy shrunk rapidly and stage shrunk for many years following the civil war. It wasn't born shrunk. It had the 15th amendment came along. We had an expansion of democracy. There was a backlash to it. It re-shrunk and the civil rights movement brought us the voting rights act, which again, grew democracy. It grew for decades. For decades it grew through bipartisan agreement and not only with Black voters. It was also passage of they updated the law to include language parity rules so that it grew people who were not native English speakers were able to vote. To make it easier for young people to vote.

There were all this bipartisan agreement on the growth of democracy, that changed with George W. Bush's administration, when the justice department under George W. Bush began this lie of voter fraud, that is where this began. It has been since then that we have seen these growth in voter suppression. It's important to think about that Supreme Court ruling, but it is also important to think about the anti-democratic movement that began with the Bush administration and exploded following the 2008 election following Obama's election.

That's when we start ordered to really see this wave of state-level laws, this was after, and then particularly in 2010, when the Tea Party wave election happened, we began to see this wave of state laws constricting democracy. That was the first time we've seen that since 1965. It's really important to understand. That this was a modern turn. Then again, now following 2020, we've seen just an explosion.

The Supreme Court gave the green light for it. Just like during the civil rights war, there's been massive organizing in some of these elections. That's in spite of the efforts of state legislatures to keep voting down. We've seen some surges in voting, but the darkness is coming. The laws we saw pass last year are going to be on the books and it is going to be-- if voting experts are to be believed we are entering into a very dangerous era in terms of how hard it's going to be for people to vote in many, many states in this country.

Brian Lehrer: We should probably say since there are three voting rights bills on the table right now, and people can get confused as to what's in each of them. The John Lewis voting rights bill specifically reinstate that pre-clearance requirement, but it doesn't go all the way back to the Jim Crow era. A state could have done something wrong in the 1950s that was racist and discriminatory, that doesn't get taken into account by the justice department today.

It sets a 25-year timeline. 25 years back from today. That doesn't even go to 1990, it's so recent. If a state has been found to have a record of discriminatory voting laws, then the justice department needs to look at any other voting law changes that come down. That's the heart of the John Lewis Bill, right?

Kai Wright: Correct. Then there are a variety of other prescriptions in the Freedom to Vote Act that are about one stopping the partisan taking over of election administration. I believe there's some stuff on the gerrymandering. The core of the John Lewis act you're right, is about basically restoring the voting rights act to its pre-2015 level of strength.

Brian Lehrer: One more date in history since you brought up the Bush administration and how its justice department started to do what it did.

Kai Wright: It laid the intellectual grounds for the movement we're seeing now.

Brian Lehrer: Right. It was in 2006 and this has come up on this show recently and some other places that are covering the current voting rights debate closely that in 2006, the Senate voted 98 to nothing. 98 to nothing presumably by that math there would've been a few Republicans in that vote, 98 to nothing to renew the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Even then six out of the eight years into the Bush administration, all the Republicans in the Senate were willing to continue to sign on to voting rights as they had been.

Kai Wright: Yes, it was very much Barack Obama's election that turned this conversation again. I think it's important to remember the intellectual roots of it with the Bush administration and John Ashcroft's justice department and creating this notion of voter fraud which is what is the thinly veil justification for everything that follows. The real explosion of turning the Republican party into an anti-democratic party happened following the 2008 election. When the wave of elections in 2010 gave those anti-democratic Republicans small democratic, Republicans control, that many state legislatures it just was off and running.

Even still, the Britain center says there were more bills passed last year than they've seen in the entirety of that 10 year period that they were tracking voter suppression bills.

Brian Lehrer: Here's Jo in Brooklyn, who has a personal Dr. King memory from 1965. Jo, you're on WNYC. Hello?

Jo Freeman: Hello, this is Jo Freeman.

Brian Lehrer: Hi, Jo.

Jo Freeman: Hello.

Brian Lehrer: We got you.

Jo Freeman: Okay. Am I on?

Brian Lehrer: Yes.

Jo Freeman: Okay. My name's Jo Freeman, I worked for Dr. King or specifically for the Southern Christian leadership Conference in '65, '66. Most people don't realize that there was a second freedom summer that began in 65. I stayed on as staff and in August through '66, I became Mrs. King's personal assistant. In October of '66, Mrs. King invited me to go to the Georgia State Fair with the entire family in part to help take care of their four children. I went to the Georgia State Fair on October 8th, 1966 with the King's family, and one other SCLC staff member.

Brian Lehrer: Jo, I wonder if you have any memory of Martin Luther King or Coretta Scott King or anyone since it sounds like you were with them just before and just after the Voting Rights Act was passed, talking about that in particular.

Jo Freeman: Okay. Well, the Voting Rights Act was signed, not passed, signed on August 6th, 1965. The SCLC summer project, which was called SCOPE started in June of '65. There were a few hundred of us who were doing voter registration both before and after the Voting Rights Act. The short answer is yes, it made a great deal of difference. I worked in both South Carolina and Alabama before the Voting Rights Act in Alabama and some other places after the voting rights act.

Before the Voting Rights Act, there was an extremely difficult literacy test that everyone had to take in order to register to vote. I can describe some of the questions on that literacy test if you like but it was an extremely difficult test. Plus the registrars were authorized to make personal decisions on who was to qualified and who wasn't. They would systematically eliminate any African American person who made the lightest little error while overlooking whites.

Some counties also required that two people vouch for the accuracy of the statement a voter applicant made whereas people hanging around the courthouse would vouch for whites who wanted to register getting someone to vouch for Blacks who wanted to register was extremely difficult.

Brian Lehrer: Which by the way don't tell Glenn Youngkin is an example of critical race theory in practice I think, Kai. Which is that the law may be the same for everybody on paper but it gets applied in discriminatory ways. We'll come back to that.

Jo, go ahead and give us an example since you said you had a few of the literacy test questions that had the intent that you say.

Jo Freeman: I have to pull something up on my computer to answer that one. If you'll indulge me a second I'll do that but I can't do that quickly.

Brian Lehrer: Give it a shot, if you can do it in like under a minute we'll wait that long. Kai, you want to say anything? Did I open a can of worms here with that remark about critical race theory?

Kai Wright: Yes, I think you're right. It's also the other piece of critical race theory and I too will be careful not to since I have not been to law school. The other piece of it is that Derek Bell for whom, who's the scholar that is credited with intellectual roots of critical race theory talked a lot about the ways in which even the civil rights movement missed the mark on this because ultimately there's a faith in institutions that the American institutions are going to do the right thing. They're going to save us and that really that isn't true.

There's a way in which I don't know, I almost think of it in a way in which white supremacy in the American context is this mini headed hydra. If you cut off one head it comes up in another place and so you can't think of it as we will strengthen this institution and the institution will protect us from it. You have to actually be engaging with a fight over white supremacy itself in an ongoing and permanent way.

That's my version of it. I'm sure there are many legal scholars who would be like, "Okay, listen, you've got it wrong too," but this is what's so absurd about the conversation about critical race theory is that this is a very complicated graduate level legal conversation. This is not something that is happening in schools. When we say critical in elementary schools and high schools. When we talk about critical race theory what we're really saying, what really is code for. This is a conversation over white identity politics and whether or not the pushback against white identity politics is appropriate.

Brian Lehrer: We're going to go back to the caller. Jo in Brooklyn, Jo, sorry to put you on the spot with this. Did you get one?

Jo Freeman: No, no I couldn't pull it up that fast. I was prepared to talk about the Georgia State Fair because you had specifically asked us something about Dr. King. I can find it but you're going to have to go under some other callers and put me back on later.

Brian Lehrer: I think we're not going to have time for that but thank you for all that you did contribute. We really appreciate your call today. Here's one more Dr. King clip from the letter from a Birmingham jail 1963, that's still instructive today and I think goes to just what Kai was making reference to a minute ago.

Martin Luther King: We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor. It must be demanded by the oppressed.

Brian Lehrer: That goes a little bit to people thinking oh, Dr. King he was just nice. He was just passive. He was just nonviolent. He is talking about oppressor. People being oppressed, the oppressed having to demand things from the oppressors.

Kai Wright: That's a quote from the Birmingham letter from the Birmingham jail bred by him. The other piece of that he says the purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. He is deliberately creating crisis not just to force white people but also to force the middle class Black people who were his peers to face the situation. He was not popular in many circles in the United States during his lifetime because he was trying to force us to face crisis. He was trying to create crisis to force us to face the problem.

Brian Lehrer: Your show last night included an interview that I think exemplifies that lesson at least a little bit with a young woman named Michaela Schillinger. We'll play a clip of her from your show in a minute. You want to set up the context of why she was on?

Kai Wright: Yes, there are as of last night at least 40 young people on a hunger strike in Washington, D.C on behalf of voting rights. This began toward the end of last year. There were 20 students from Arizona who went on hunger strike to try to pressure the democratic party to make this a priority, to make the voting rights bills a priority in Congress. They paused their hunger strike following when they vowed to have a vote for this weekend and after Senator Kyrsten Sinema dashed to those hopes last week.

They went back on hungers strike joined by some clergy. Let it not be said that there are no youth trying to fight Michaela and these 40 students are currently sitting out in the freezing cold in DC on hungers strike.

Brian Lehrer: Here's 40 seconds of Michaela Schillinger.

Michaela Schillinger: It's constantly being said that my generation is going to be the one to save the world. We are going to be the ones to solve climate change. We're going to be the ones to do something about our democracy about our human rights. Everyone says we're going to be the ones to save it all. That is terrifying. That is a lot of pressure and as much as I want to be the one to save it all, it is really hard going through college trying to get a degree with the weight of the world on my shoulders

Brian Lehrer: Michaela Schillinger on the United States of Anxiety with Kai Wright last night. Kai, there have been a number of hunger strikes in the news recently. I don't know if you've noticed the trend but at the Rikers Island jail, by taxi cab drivers in New York City around their medallions becoming almost worthless through city policy, around the COP26 Climate Summit.

I don't know, does a hunger strike move Ted Cruz? Does it move Rand Paul? Does it move Jo Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema to make a filibuster exemption for a Voting Rights Bill they actually support? Have you thought about this?

Kai Wright: I guess again I'd go back to King. I think it's very easy for us to sit and be like, "Well, is that the right tactic? Is that the right tactic? Can you do this? Can you do that. That is a game that I think a lot of people play in times of comfort. As we move into times of crisis, part of direct action, part of activism of any sort is King's lesson. You have to force the issue, you have to create crises.

What they're trying to do with hunger strikes with all of these is force the issue. Is force people to pay attention and you don't know what comes out the back end of that. It's so easy. It's also easy to look back at the civil rights movement and be like, "Oh, they had this very clear set of ideas and then they did it and they worked and it changed it." There were many many campaigns that led up to the Voting Rights Act, all of which were geared towards trying to force people to pay attention. Trying to say you have to pick a side in this fight.

I think what you see in stuff like the Rikers hunger strike I think is a great example. It's so easy to just forget Rikers is over there. It is. If we're being honest with ourselves those of us who are not in jail or do not have a loved one in jail it's very easy to just, "Oh, yes, you know. There's Rikers on that island." Meanwhile people are dying and so what can you do when you have no other power you can use your body.

The civil rights movement put their bodies in the streets and left themselves open to violence to dramatize the situation. There are a lot of people today saying, "Well, I'll put my body in danger through a hunger strike to dramatize the situation." I think we can't get into a place where we're saying will this work or will this not work? The point is people are trying to create pressure. You never know what's going to come out the back end of creating that pressure.

Brian Lehrer: That's why corporations don't hold street demonstrations because they don't have to.

Kai Wright: They don't have to.

Brian Lehrer: Let's do about five minutes on how Dr. King is taught before we run out to time in this segment. I want to read, we'll let callers do most of this but I want to read something from an article this weekend on the Black oriented website The Root by Murjani Rawls. It starts by saying, "When I was a kid, I remember the first time I learned about Dr. Martin Luther king Jr. The Disneyland version. There were slight mentions of protests and arrest. However my teachers gave the most significant amount of time to King's "I Have a Dream," speech he gave a 1963 at Washington DC and his principles of nonviolence."

We constantly emphasize one quote. "I have a dream that my four little children one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by content of their character." Then it goes on and says then we jump right to his assassination in 1968, the end. We knew everything about the American revolution, the Boston Tea Party, and how George Washington crossed the Potomac river with his powdered wig intact.

It wasn't until I got older that I learned about the March in Selma Alabama, bloody Sunday, the poor people's campaign, Jay Edgar Hoover ordering surveillance of his activities, King's activities with the FBI or that his house got bombed in 1956. Much of that research were things to do on my own. That from The Root this weekend. How did you learn about Dr. King in school? Briefly, Kai.

Kai Wright: It's interesting I'm going to be really eager to hear what callers have to say about this because I don't really remember learning about him in school. I'm sure I did. Most of what I know about King and about Black history period was taught in my home. It is history I learned with my family, with the books that my father urged me to read and at church. At home and at church are the places I learned my Black history. I genuinely don't have a memory of how I learned it at school. I imagine it was quite similar of just a quick gloss.

Brian Lehrer: Janine and Springfield Virginia has a memory. Janine, you're on WNYC. Thanks for calling today.

Janine: Hey Brian. Hi Kai. What Kai Wright has said today has been sermon, so thank you for your testimony. I went to a school named Robert E. Lee High School which was just recently changed to John Lewis High School. We learned nothing in the '70s. My history comes from my grandfather who was a sharecropper and used to tell me terrifying stories of the Klan when I was way too young to be hearing stories like that, but it framed me as a storyteller.

Actually I grew up in a religion where we didn't celebrate holidays or birthdays. I was always sent to the library when it was someone's birthday. In the '70s there was this hippie white librarian who would bring some batch of books for me to read Maya Angelou and just different all of the books that were about race in the '70s she would bring me. I would read and I would bring them home.

I was through home study and through my grandfather. Then in high school I was in the awareness of Black Culture club where there were six of us and we would skip school and go to protest apartheid in Washington DC. We would advocate for the Martin Luther King Day holiday. My history is so self taught and I think that right now I think things were probably going to go back to the Republicans winning, and I think it's really important for progressives to start to look to those times when we had to self educate and we had to do the hard things that we had to do to learn in order to vote as abolitionists did and work.

Brian Lehrer: Do you think that they're going to change the name of your elementary school back to Robert E. Lee or off of John Lewis because it might make white people feel bad?

Janine: Of the high school?

Brian Lehrer: High school, I'm sorry.

Janine: No, it's okay. I don't know. This literally during the whole George Floyd happening was going on and I was protesting by myself. It was a few of us that we had to go to Robert E. Lee high school when I was in high school. Looking at the Facebook group which when I left and moved to New York I wouldn't be back here unless there was COVID. When I looked at the Facebook group to see what people my age were saying, it was quite frightening.

I'm not surprised that Glenn Youngkin won, and I think that we and a lot of these people have guns. I think that on the progressive side, we're going to have to be even more crafty and have a multiracial intergenerational all identities coming together to creatively be abolitionists. I don't know what that looks like, but Jo Madison is out there. He's on a hunger strike too at his age.

Brian Lehrer: Radio host.

Janine: It's up to people like you, Brian, and what Kai is doing and what artists are doing. We do have the internet. We have the tools available but I don't know what it's going to look like. We are going to have to create whatever this new type of world is going to be through our own means.

Brian Lehrer: You talked about that the multiracial movement that's necessary which circles all the way back to what Martin Luther King was building in his day and that has to be the last word for this segment. We have the director of the Schomburg Center standing by and we've already gotten over time with Kai because just so much. We will take more calls later in the show on some of these same themes so stay with us.

Meanwhile we thank Kai Wright, host of the United States of Anxiety the WNYC podcast and Sunday night six o'clock live call in show. Listeners, if you like this live call-in show. Monday through Friday we have one on the weekends and it's Kai. Sunday nights at six o'clock the United States of Anxiety. Kai, thanks for joining us today.

Kai Wright: Thank you so much, Brian.

 

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