Eddie Glaude Jr.
Appearances
Fresh Air
MLK, The Organizer & Radical Thinker
Right. I mean, he's trying to suggest that, you know, a kind of realistic politics is necessary. But, you know, even in the way in which he characterized the moment, King is speaking. He knows he's speaking to a particular audience because the March on Washington is framed by death. Medgar Evers is assassinated before the march. The Birmingham bombing after the march is the response, right?
Fresh Air
MLK, The Organizer & Radical Thinker
We get 64 and 65, of course, with the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. But what's happening on the ground is horrific on a certain level. King is also grappling with the recalcitrance of the North. You know, Gene Theo Harris has a new book coming out soon on King in the North. And what we see is that he's in the North repeatedly throughout his career, right? So what is he seeing there?
Fresh Air
MLK, The Organizer & Radical Thinker
He's seeing these liberals decrying the violence of the South, right? but hiding behind that liberalism as they maintain deep, deep segregation in northern cities, right, as they themselves invest in the idea that certain people, because of the color of their skin, ought to be valued more than others.
Fresh Air
MLK, The Organizer & Radical Thinker
What does it mean to then address, right, not just simply, you know, laws, right, Jim Crow, you know, counters or, you know, cafeterias or restaurants? What does it mean to deal with the structural reality of the ghetto in Chicago? Police brutality in New York, right? And the like. And so King sees that it was easy to integrate, you know, to integrate a counter for a cup of coffee.
Fresh Air
MLK, The Organizer & Radical Thinker
But these deeper structural matters cut to the heart of who the nation and what the nation is.
Fresh Air
MLK, The Organizer & Radical Thinker
I'm King obsessed. You know, my last three books each have consists in a chapter or has a chapter on Dr. King, trying to figure it out. And, you know, in the last book, we are the leaders we've been looking for. I'm trying to grapple with this figure in my own imagination. As a country boy from Mississippi who goes to Morehouse, I'm baptized in King's waters, right?
Fresh Air
MLK, The Organizer & Radical Thinker
Socialized in his career, his activism, his witness. And oftentimes what happens is that... We outsource our own responsibility to the folk who came before us. Oh, if we only had a Dr. King today. Or we find ourselves being complicit or consenting to, rather, a style of leadership. That allows us in some ways to abdicate our responsibility to change the moment right in front of us.
Fresh Air
MLK, The Organizer & Radical Thinker
King is so large that we become really small. You know, great people come to us not for us to be supplicants, but they come to us so that we can understand the greatness that's in us. They come as models for us, exemplars. And so oftentimes Dr. King is invoked, right, to discipline. Oh, let me say something that might be a little bit controversial here.
Fresh Air
MLK, The Organizer & Radical Thinker
Dr. King is often invoked to justify certain people being in front of the march. Mm-hmm. There you go. I was with him. I'm in his tradition. He's also invoked to discipline what constitutes legitimate forms of political dissent. That's not what Dr. King would say. Remember what the former mayor of Atlanta, Kasim Reed, said? Dr. King wouldn't take over a highway.
Fresh Air
MLK, The Organizer & Radical Thinker
The idea is to kind of contain and constrain what constitutes legitimate forms of political dissent. We can only engage in mimicry, imitation in some ways, according to certain invocations of Dr. King. He's used to beat us over our heads so that we can't find the truth. the energy, the courage, the imagination, the creative will to speak to our moment with his legacy as the wind beneath our wings.
Fresh Air
MLK, The Organizer & Radical Thinker
Instead, we're supposed to kiss his feet. Now, that's one critical orientation. But again, remember how I began. I'm king obsessed. What does it mean to stand in that tradition of
Fresh Air
MLK, The Organizer & Radical Thinker
What does it mean to understand that Miss Ella Baker, who was the first executive director of SCLC, who was very critical and suspicious of charismatic leadership, used to say, you know, strong people don't need strong leaders. We need to understand that we are the leaders we've been looking for.
Fresh Air
MLK, The Organizer & Radical Thinker
Oh, absolutely. I mean, capitalism is broken, right? It presupposes scarcity, presupposes the disposability of people. It orients us to the world that we just simply consume where growth is the only value to whether or not we're succeeding as a society or not. King understood that. And what we've seen – I mean we're in a second gilded age where oligarchs are just getting richer and richer.
Fresh Air
MLK, The Organizer & Radical Thinker
They're using their means to influence government, the reins of power and the like. And you see folk who are vulnerable, right? They're vulnerable and they're becoming even more – their situation is becoming even more precarious. And oftentimes they're on the front lines of the catastrophes of climate change.
Fresh Air
MLK, The Organizer & Radical Thinker
Not only in places like New Orleans, but in unexpected places like North Central North Carolina. Yes. That part of North Carolina. So I think it's important for us to understand that there are folk who are appealing to hatred and grievance while they're robbing. the nation blind while they're destroying the planet.
Fresh Air
MLK, The Organizer & Radical Thinker
And in so many ways, I think to echo Heather McGee's brilliant work, they want us to believe that this is a zero-sum game, that there's only so much pie to go around because they're stealing all of it.
Fresh Air
MLK, The Organizer & Radical Thinker
Well, I would want to say that, you know, just that there is a poor people's campaign today, right? with Reverend Bishop Barber, right? And Reverend Theo Harris, right? So there is this effort, but it's the current environment, the current soil. And I think part of what we're experiencing in this moment is a crisis.
Fresh Air
MLK, The Organizer & Radical Thinker
of an economic or political economic philosophy that its contradictions are in full view. That crisis has evidenced itself in education, healthcare, in crass and crude inequality. I mean, all of the contradictions of neoliberalism are in full view right now.
Fresh Air
MLK, The Organizer & Radical Thinker
So you have folk on national television saying, if we don't do something about this inequality, this vast gap between the super rich and everybody else, we're gonna have revolution. And you actually hear that on mainstream news. So I think what Reverend Barber is trying to do and others, the conditions are emerging for some kind of breakthrough.
Fresh Air
MLK, The Organizer & Radical Thinker
The question is that just as those conditions are emerging, there are counter forces aiming to defend the status quo. And we have to understand that. And that's why organizing is so important as we lift up Dr. King.
Fresh Air
MLK, The Organizer & Radical Thinker
We need to understand that he's a product of organizing, that he comes out of a tradition and he is surrounded by a tradition of everyday ordinary folk organizing in pursuit of ends and goods that in so many ways can transform the lives of folks. So we have a poor people's campaign.
Fresh Air
MLK, The Organizer & Radical Thinker
We have a modern day iteration and we have the conditions, I think, for it to even become more important over the coming years.
Fresh Air
MLK, The Organizer & Radical Thinker
I think it's absolutely right. I think it's right on. I mean, this is not an either or. We don't have to buy into the binary. We want to constrain evil as we fight evil. And we need to understand the workings of the law in helping us constrain evil as we try to become better people.
Fresh Air
MLK, The Organizer & Radical Thinker
It's King confronting the reality of the challenge before him, that there are large numbers of people, of white people in the country, who are more committed to their selfish pursuits than they are to justice. That they're willing to throw away a fundamental affirmation of the dignity and standing of everyday ordinary folk in pursuit of their own aims and ends.
Fresh Air
MLK, The Organizer & Radical Thinker
But he thanks God that there are a few who aren't like that. And, you know, it's that few, right, those of us who are committed to a better world, that together we can fight for democracy itself. So I chose it because I'm grappling with how does King muster the resources to keep fighting in the face of the country's unwillingness to change fundamentally. And so here we see the realism happening.
Fresh Air
MLK, The Organizer & Radical Thinker
You know, I think human beings are complex. We are capable of extraordinary things and terrible things all at once. The same I think holds true for nations and that's all we need to do is tell the truth about the histories of countries and we see that complexity in full view.
Fresh Air
MLK, The Organizer & Radical Thinker
And we see the hope. And that's what we need in this moment, I think.
Fresh Air
MLK, The Organizer & Radical Thinker
I think what's going to be really fascinating or what's fascinating to me is the kind of collision of two versions of America, two views of America. Donald Trump is what he is. Mago-Republicanism is what it is. It's an echo of a longstanding view that ours must remain a white nation in the vein of old Europe.
Fresh Air
MLK, The Organizer & Radical Thinker
And this idea of really reading the Declaration of Independence into the Constitution, right, to understand who we the people actually is, to really think about what does it mean that all men and women are created equal and to read that into a certain understanding of the country.
Fresh Air
MLK, The Organizer & Radical Thinker
And to bring the full weight of the history of race, the history of slavery more particularly or more specifically into that conversation is important. So for me, it's this kind of ironic, startling in some ways, juxtaposition to have the inauguration of Donald Trump on the day that we celebrate MLK, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. So it's a fascinating moment in the history of the country.
Fresh Air
MLK, The Organizer & Radical Thinker
You know, Tressie, I think that's a very important point. We have to think about this moment as a kind of reflection of the continuous loop That is American history, right? This moment where the country seems to give voice to a notion of freedom, an idea of liberty, this commitment to democracy.
Fresh Air
MLK, The Organizer & Radical Thinker
But it's always shadowed by the ugliness of its commitment to white supremacy, this commitment to the idea that white people matter more than others. And so you always get over the course of the country. This sense that we're making progress and then we double down on the ugliness and then we have to deal with this kind – we call it a backlash, a betrayal or however. King lived through that.
Fresh Air
MLK, The Organizer & Radical Thinker
And so to think about King post-March on Washington, to think about Dr. King in 1966 and 1967 and 68, he's dealing with the country that is turning its back on the very movement that he's risked everything for. He sees Ronald Reagan and what Reagan is doing in California.
Fresh Air
MLK, The Organizer & Radical Thinker
He understands what the state has deployed in terms of the repressive state apparatus and the way it's repressing black organizers around the country, the way in which Nixonianism is beginning to take shape. So what does it mean to really deal with Dr. King? In 1966, he's in Grenada, Mississippi. organizing to get some elementary students to integrate a school and some high school students.
Fresh Air
MLK, The Organizer & Radical Thinker
John Rundle High School, I believe. And you know what happened? These black kids come out of that school and white adults with baseball bats and tree limbs attack those babies. And King retreats to his bed. Andrew Young said he had never seen this level of depression in Dr. King. He refused to get up. And it wasn't until Joan Baez sang a chorus of pilgrim sorrow that he began to stir.
Fresh Air
MLK, The Organizer & Radical Thinker
So the depth of his despair, of his depression in the face of the country's betrayal, we rarely grapple with that on this day because we, you know, as Tressie has laid out, we have a certain memory of him that allows us to pat ourselves on the back.
Fresh Air
MLK, The Organizer & Radical Thinker
The answer is, of course, more complicated than just simply because they're racist. But there's a substantive moral judgment here.
Fresh Air
MLK, The Organizer & Radical Thinker
And it's a similar kind of logic that those students who risked everything and engaged in nonviolent discipline in the bowels of the South, in Alabama, in Mississippi, in Georgia, and the like, in confronting these brutal sheriffs, get the legislation passed and the material conditions of their lives haven't really changed. And white America is telling them
Fresh Air
MLK, The Organizer & Radical Thinker
What else does the—you know, as James Baldwin hated this question, what else does the Negro want? He hated that question because he said the question reveals that they didn't think of him as a human being just like they think of themselves. They think of us instead as a charitable enterprise, you see.
Fresh Air
MLK, The Organizer & Radical Thinker
And so I think the anger, the grief is rooted in a deeply skeptical view of the moral capacity of the nation. in this moment. The skepticism is in full bloom. And one wonders, where do we go from here?