Vann R. Newkirk II
speaker
24 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 19 Jan
Vann R. Newkirk II’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
We're lost.
This is Monday.
Mm-hmm.
I can remember snippets through the world news.
The Daily Show: Ears Edition · TDS Time Machine | How Not to Celebrate MLK Day · 19 Jan 2025
podcast
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 against tyranny.
And so you have teachers who are state agents, right, 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 N-word with his students and was suspended for doing it, you give that guy a gun.
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, something they had never thought about, something they never even fathomed about Dr. King. And what that does as a whole is so many times politicians bring up, or people who 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? Right.
So nobody, everybody now is pro-King and not racist, but nobody's reading King now for how to be anti-racist.
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 we won. And what I could never reconcile was how did we win if Dr. King was assassinated 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 derailed? 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 and tears and unrest and riots, and how you go from there to here in 50 years and say we won.
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 homeownership rates, segregation in schools haven't gone anywhere in 50 years.
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 in 1970. So what are we talking about?
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.
Yeah, I learned a lot reading that essay from Jean 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 Coretta, right? He was 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 texts about what to read and how to learn and grow.
So if you look at Coretta, Coretta Scott King, not just as King's help me, as someone who was an activist in her 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 organizing structures that actually King relied on when he was doing the boycotts. Those were built by black women against sexual assault.
The same things, yeah.
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