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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now for Martin Luther King's birthday, it's an oral history call in centering Black voices for anyone who remembers the civil rights era. We'll call that roughly any of the years from World War II through to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and up until Dr. King was assassinated in 1968. Here's the invitation. If you identify as Black and have memories of any of that time, share a memory of the movement and something you think the civil rights laws did accomplish or did not accomplish. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692.

We'll open it up to other folks as well later in the hour. We'll start by centering Black voices in this oral history call in to focus on the lived experience of people who did not have that much of a public voice in the pre-civil rights laws version of systemic racism. We want to make sure to create an oral history space to hear some of how the lived experience of you and your descendants directly affected have become more equal in some ways and in some ways not.

What do you remember from back then and where are we now as it affects you and yours? 211-2 433-WNYC as you're invited to share a memory from the movement, if you lived through any of the civil rights era of Dr. King's lifetime, and you get a free opinion on something that has changed since then or something that hasn't. 212-433-969-2. Your memory from the movement can be an iconic one or not.

Maybe you were on the bus with Rosa Parks or talked to Jackie Robinson about starting out with the Dodgers, or maybe you were ever in the presence of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. himself on any occasion and want to remember that out loud. 212-433-WNYC, 433-9692. On Dr. King, yesterday would've been his 94th birthday. There are definitely some of you living today who would've been aware of King in his time. This year happens to be the 60th anniversary year of the iconic march on Washington and the I Have a Dream speech, August 28th, 1963.

I know we'll talk about it this summer too, for the round number anniversary. I know there's going to be a commemoration march that's going to take place this summer, but there was of course so much more to Dr. King's life and activism than that. Anyone out there remember reading or hearing about his letter from Birmingham Jail? Also, 1963 after King's arrest for staging a band demonstration on Good Friday, that year, 21 typed pages that letter, published to the national media the following month, justifying his direct action tactics in Birmingham and admonishing white moderate clergy people not to sit on the sidelines or not to only approve of tepid activism.

The Encyclopedia of Alabama calls that the most important written document of the Civil Rights era. That letter, anyone read the whole thing back in the day? 212-433-WNYC. Maybe your memory from the movement is not iconic at all. Maybe it's just something you or a parent or anyone else you know, did along the way, in school, as a teacher, or a student, or in the streets in a king or other protest, in a political campaign, or lobbying for a civil rights law or policy change.

What's your memory from the movement? 212-433-WNYC and on what's changed or not changed? We'll talk a little later in the hour to Historian Peniel Joseph for a professional historian's take, but I think we can say many forms of official government discrimination have gone away. You can't bar Black people explicitly from schools or neighborhoods or jobs or service in restaurants or other things like people could back then and many other things too.

We mentioned last hour how for the first time the House of Representatives in this new Congress now has the same percentage of Black representatives, 13%, as the percentage of Black people in the United States according to CBS News yesterday. Here's a clip of Martin Luther King himself from NBC News three years after the landmark Civil Rights Law of 1964 was passed, this was 1967, and they replayed it on MSNBC this morning in which King practically predicted the realities of today so many years later.

Dr. King: It's much easier to integrate a lunch counter than it is to guarantee an annual income, for instance, to get rid of poverty for Negroes and all poor people. It's much easier to integrate a bus than it is to make genuine integration a reality and quality education a reality in our schools. It's much easier to integrate even a public park than it is to get rid of slums. I think we are in a new era, a new phase of the struggle where we have moved from a struggle for decency which characterize our struggle for 10 or 12 years to a struggle for genuine equality. This is where we are getting the resistance because there was never any intention to go this far.

Brian Lehrer: Dr. King on NBC in the '60s. Let's talk about it because it's still so relevant for so many reasons. For example, I'll give you one stat about wealth and income inequality. It's really shameful for our society as the Civil Rights of 1964 will turn 60 itself next year, two or three whole generations since then. According to the Federal Reserve Board. You can't get much of a more mainstream source than that. According to the Fed, 15% of the population is Black in this country, 3% of the wealth in this country is owned by Black people.

That's a shameful systemic failure to make good on the promise of 1964. Something different has to be done in this white person's opinion to be a moral society, considering the last 404 years of our history since the first enslaved people were brought here in 1619. White households account for 69% of the population but hold 87% of the overall wealth. Black Americans, 15% of the population, 3% of the wealth. Obviously there is work to be done.

If you have memories of any of the movement, the Civil Rights era and you identify as Black for this first section of calls and we'll open it to everybody, share a memory of the movement and something you think the civil rights laws did accomplish or did not accomplish. 212-433 WNYC. We'll take your calls right after this.

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Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now to your memories of the movement from the civil rights era, if you were alive back then during Dr. King's lifetime and what have the civil rights laws accomplished? What haven't they accomplished? According to you? Name one thing on either side or both of that ledger. Roland in Tampa, you're on WNYC. Hi, Roland.

Roland: Good morning. How y'all doing up there?

Brian Lehrer: Doing all right. How about you?

Roland: Okay. I was a little bit too young to have been in the march on Washington, but I did meet Nelson Mandela shortly after he was elected president of South Africa. We spent an evening where mostly Madiba talked and the rest of us listened. The thing that I took away from that dinner meeting was his talk about a truth and reconciliation commission. He spoke about this because he said that South Africa could never have a reconciliation until it had accepted the truth.

I think the Civil Rights Bill, the Voting Rights Act, my mother was from South Carolina. She grew up there. It was part of the great migration north to get away from Dixies. White America, Black America, until we have an acceptance of what really happened, it's hard to really truly implement what the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Act meant. Just last Monday Governor Ron DeSantis gave a long inaugural speech up in Tallahassee, his second term.

He spoke for 30, 40 minutes without mentioning the Rosewood race riot which was on the 100th anniversary, at his inaugural speech. A hundred years ago, a white woman whose husband was not paying attention to her claimed that a Black man had assaulted her. That led to a riot which wound up with hundreds of Blacks being killed, Black businesses being burned down, Black homes being burned and a lot of the Blacks who survived Rosewood went north as soon as they possibly could and never looked back down here again. The governor of Florida--

Brian Lehrer: To hear DeSantis's speech, the biggest racial problem we have in this country or that you have in Florida right now is teaching too much Black history in a way that makes white kids feel bad, right?

Roland: Yes. I've spoken to a group of teenagers, high school kids the week before who'd never heard of Rosewood.

Brian Lehrer: I have one question for you before I move on to some other calls. Roland, a question for you about that session with Mandela. If he talked about truth and reconciliation, did he talk about what reconciliation means because if you think about the word, it really has two different meanings and I think both applied probably, but I wonder if he got explicit about it at all because to reconcile, we think of to make up and then move on together after a conflict but also in finance, when you reconcile, you're reconciling your debts.

You're making sure your debts are paid and in the case of racial history in the United States as well as South Africa, we need to reconcile our debts. That's reconciliation too. I'm just curious if anything like that came up.

Roland: Madiba did address that and he thought that South Africa was a very wealthy country in terms of mineral wealth, natural resources and then those things had to be redistributed fairly to all of the people. The Asians, the Africans would move there. We forget the fact that a lot of the Indigenous people moved around quite a bit in prehistoric times. When you say whose South Africa is South Africa, Mandela recognized that we were all here, but we all have to share equally in the pie.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you, Roland. Really appreciate your call. We really appreciate it. Thank you very, very much. Ernest in Flatbush, you're on WNYC. Hi, Ernest.

Ernest: Hello, Brian. My memories of the Civil Rights Movement ingrained in my mind. I came to this country in 1967 from Trinidad and Tobago in the Caribbean. I was extremely impressed with the work that then known as Stokely Carmichael was doing in the whole era of civil rights, working so closely with his African American brothers and sisters to bring equity and justice. Since I came to this country to go to Howard University, which is considered the mecca of Black education, civil rights was all around every day we lived it.

I had the opportunity to walk side by side with Stokely Carmichael when Martin Luther King was killed. He was in Washington, DC at the time and he took to the streets and we went to several of the cinemas along Youth Street and closed them down. We told people that they needed to be more proactive in looking after their own well-being. You asked about what has not happened so far in terms of the movement and what we have not made progress on is reparations, which is the unfinished business that needs to be done. Similar to the reconciliation that you spoke about, that is one of the unfinished businesses in America.

Brian Lehrer: Ernest, thank you very much. We really appreciate your call. We're going to go next to John in North Brunswick. John, you're on WNYC. Hi there.

John: Good morning, Brian. Longtime listener. I was born in 1956 and I'm probably the last generation to get to hear Martin Luther King speak while he was alive. My sisters are about a decade older than me and we have relatives in the South. They can remember having to sit in the balcony, that's just the way it was. Segregation was the thing. For me, the biggest thing that is helping this situation to continue, the racism is the fact that in our country, we draw a legal line between de facto and de jure discrimination. If you didn't mean it based on color, we're not going to make you stop.

That's just wrong. Since Dr. King's death, our economy has grown by leaps and bounds, but the number of poor people has only stayed the same. The number has grown, the percentage of poor has stayed the same. We've broken quite a few things and we have to think about it in order to fix it, but no one wants to think about it. I don't understand.

Brian Lehrer: John, thank you very much. To your point when we talk to Historian Penial Joseph in a few minutes, we'll talk about the last campaign of King's Life, the Poor People's campaign, four years after the Civil Rights Act was passed. To the previous caller's call, you mentioned Stokely Carmichael, Peniel is a biographer, both of Martin Luther King and Stokely Carmichael. We'll try to tie those two together for you, but let's keep going for now, with calls. Roosevelt in Montclair, you're on WNYC. Hi, Roosevelt. Thanks so much for calling in.

Roosevelt: Good morning. How are you?

Brian Lehrer: Good, thank you.

Roosevelt: I wanted to share with you my experience in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was a student at Howard and teaching in the public school and the riot broke out between the white students and Black students. I led a [unintelligible 00:15:42] to encourage the city of Cambridge to hire more Black teachers and administrators in the public school. We marched for days and eventually, we were able to get Black folks in the public school system and Black principals. That's my contribution to the Civil Rights Movement.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you. Do you want to talk about how you feel today in light of your experience dating all the way back to that time and the changes that you've seen or not seen?

Roosevelt: I grew up in the segregated South. I've seen a great deal of change in terms of some opportunities and economically growth. However, the struggle is still there. As a former peaceful volunteer in Senegal, West Africa, I was there during independence. I can relate some of my experience in Africa to what's happening here in this country. Black folks and people of color have made progress, but we have to continue to struggle to make sure that all people, particular people of color have an opportunity to be liberated completely.

Brian Lehrer: Roosevelt, thank you so much. Let's see, according to my screener, this next caller is Ray and his daughters in Westchester. Is that right? Do we have three people on the line here? Ray? Do we have Ray in Westchester? Is that you, Ray? Hi, who's this?

William: Do you call William?

Brian Lehrer: Yes. I think somehow I got your name wrong, but you tell me. William. Hi, William. You're on WNYC and do you have daughters on the line with you as well?

William: Yes, my daughter was here. My daughter El Monte.

El Monte: That's fine. This is El Monte. I had called during your on 15--

Brian Lehrer: Oh, El Monte, I know you from your previous calls and the business you run in Mount Vernon. Right?

El Monte: Yes, that's me. I'm here with my [inaudible 00:18:16] 99 and telling me about his experiences during the civil rights movement. Go ahead, Dad.

William: Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Yes sir.

William: Thank you. I am 99 years old and up to this very day always in my brain how lucky I am to be alive. I was in Houston, Texas and I went into the white waiting room, not really knowing [unintelligible 00:18:52] from New York area. The policeman came in with a big, long gun just pointed to where I was supposed to be in the Black area. I did not know what he was talking about.

Finally, he said, "Sit your ass over there." Pointed to the Black area. At that time I was about 33 years old. Had he touched me, I would've parked back not know the rules of the South, knowing but not thinking. Up to this very day, I still think how lucky I am to be shocked because I would have fought him. That was my mindset at the time and how I was deprived all the ways, serving in restaurants. Sleep in train [unintelligible 00:19:54]. In those days, I still think so much opportunities are open since the favorite area, even in a learning area where a lot of people are shut out from their potential growth. That's what I have.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Thank you so much. El Monte, if I understood his story correctly, he was someone from the North who went to the South during the segregation era. He went into a white waiting room when he was supposed to go to the Black waiting room, but he didn't know that was a thing. He basically was moved to the Black waiting room at gunpoint and feels he's lucky to be alive because he could have been shot in that instance if he had talked back in the wrong way. How close did it come?

El Monte: Well, fortunately, and that particular incident, a Black man in the waiting room helped to usher my father out of the waiting room and told him the situation. My father had immigrated from Montserrat, British Western Andes in the '30s, I believe. He has worked as a merchant Marine and traveled all over the United States. He was refused to eat in Baltimore, and he and his white companion were refused to eat not knowing, getting off the ship, he just told me last night about how he was on Broadway and a police officer knocked his tooth out when he was just inquiring for directions.

He has had many encounters and is a very strong personality, very strong-willed man. I know that a lot of that has helped him to accomplish what he has in his life over this time. He definitely credits the changes in the civil rights era with the opportunities being able to, even right now we live still in New Rochelle, he lives in New Rochelle. This area was not open to Black people prior to the time we had moved here in '81.

Brian Lehrer: Anything you want to add from the daughter's perspective about change? I'm not sure people who didn't live through the civil rights era are more optimistic today in ways surveys that I referenced before in the show, show there may be more pessimism today than even back then.

El Monte: I vacillate. Of course, I see the opportunities and changes as I'm a student of my father in history that have happened in the past. The opportunities for me to drive up and down 95, that was not an opportunity I would've had previous when I had to used the Green Book. I also see, we're in a post-reconstruction period right now. Every time that African-Americans make an advance, there is a repercussion or reverberation through the country of denialism and mythology and the previous college talking about never having this truth and reconciliation where the country has never really said this is what happened.

Both of your meetings, in this particular case, I don't think even in South Africa today, there's this reconciliation, but at least there's a record of what happens and where we can go from there when we don't have that in the United States.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you so much for your call, and if your dad is still listening, thank you so much for your call. We're going to take a break here in this oral history call in for Martin Luther King Day. We have more of you on the line. We'll get to more of you, but we're also going to add Historian Peniel Joseph. Stay with us.

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