100 Years of 100 Things: Martin Luther King, Jr.

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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. We'll have a one-hour show today and then hand off at eleven o'clock to NPR in Washington for live coverage of the inauguration. There's a lot of news already this morning that we'll get to some of before the handoff, including last-minute preemptive pardons of Anthony Fauci, Liz Cheney, and others by President Biden this morning, and news of day one executive orders Trump as president will be issuing on all kinds of things.

Here we are really on this very unusual and poignant intersection of Martin Luther King Day and Inauguration Day. Unless the King holiday and what it stands for get lost in the breaking news of Inauguration Day, we'll begin this morning with the portion that I hosted yesterday of our annual Martin Luther King weekend event at the Apollo Theater. This runs about 20 minutes.

My guests at the Apollo were Brooklyn College and CUNY grad center historian Dr. Jeanne Theoharis and Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis of the Middle Collegiate Church in the East Village. As you'll hear, we presented this as a live on-stage edition of our centennial series, 100 Years of 100 Things. I'll pick it up as I'm telling the audience in the house what that is.

On my radio show. In conjunction with WNYC Centennial, we're doing a series called 100 Years of 100 Things, and we're framing the conversation that we're about to have in the context of that. We're up to thing number 60 in that series, which we'll call almost 100 years of Martin Luther King and His Quest for Freedom in New York City and Elsewhere in the North. I'll say that again. Martin Luther King and his Quest for Freedom in New York City and Elsewhere in the North.

I say almost 100 years because Dr. King was born on January 15th, 1929, and he would have turned 96 this past Wednesday. We'll take the liberty of a little bit of rounding to include this in the series. With me on the stage will be-- Come on out.

Speaker 1: Joining Brian on the stage of Burning House: MLK and the American Experiment, please welcome Jacqui Lewis, author of Fierce Love and distinguished professor of political science at Brooklyn College of CUNY, Dr. Jeanne Theoharris.

[applause]

Brian Lehrer: A little more about them. As her Brooklyn College Bio page states, Dr. Jeanne Theoharis is the author or co-author of 11 books and numerous articles on the civil rights and Black Power movements and the contemporary politics of race in the United States. Two of them will be most relevant to this conversation, one that came out in 2003 called Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South, 1940 to 1980, and a brand new one that is just about to be released called King of North: Martin Luther King Jr.'s Life of Struggle Outside the South.

The Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis, Senior Minister at the Middle Collegiate Church in the East Village, which persists as a congregation and is coming back as a building after it was destroyed by fire in the year 2020. Something Rev. Dr. Lewis will describe from her bio is being an eight-year-old kid in Chicago when Dr. King was killed and how pivotal that was to shaping the direction in her life.

Rev. Dr. Lewis is also author of the book, which just the title will indicate how much she sees herself following in Dr. King's footsteps since 1968. It's called Fierce Love: A Bold Path to Ferocious Courage and Rule-Breaking Kindness that Can Heal the World. Fierce Love came out in 2021. Audience, please welcome Dr. Theoharris and Rev. Dr. Lewis.

[applause]

Brian Lehrer: Let's begin in 1927, that's almost 100 years ago. King is still two years from being born, but Dr. Theaharris, you wrote an op-ed in the New York Times a few years ago that began with Donald Trump's father being arrested at a Klan rally in the year 1927. Where was that Klan rally?

Dr. Jeanne Theoharis: It was right here in New York City. I think remembering both Fred Trump, but the presence of what some people talk about as the second wave of the Klan in the early 20th century really has its heart in the North, in the Midwest, in the West Coast. Fred Trump is part of that, and their signature accomplishment is the 1924 Immigration Act that puts quotas on immigration.

Brian Lehrer: What was Fred Trump arrested for, and what was a Klan rally doing in New York?

Dr. Jeanne Theoharis: He was arrested for, I think, a disorderly charge. I think part of what the Klan was doing was making its presence and visibility known. I think we want to think about Fred Trump not just in that moment, but we fast-forward 50 years, and the Department of Justice files suit against the Trump organization for systematically discriminating against Black tenants and taking federal money to do so. Much of the housing that Fred Trump builds in the post-war period is with federal money, and yet it largely excludes Black residents. We can think about places, particularly in Brooklyn, where that happened.

Brian Lehrer: Now, I'm going to jump ahead to when Martin Luther King was 21 years old, that would have been 1950. You've written about the story of King and some friends being refused service in a bar. It wasn't in Georgia or Mississippi or Alabama, but in New Jersey. Can you tell a little of that story?

Dr. Jeanne Theoharis: We may all remember Dr. King graduates from Morehouse, and then he goes to Crozer Seminary in Pennsylvania. Him and some friends have gone out to this bar in Maple Shade, New Jersey, and they ask to be served. They are refused. New Jersey had recently passed an anti-discrimination law, so King and his friends cite that law, and the owner kicks them out at gunpoint.

I think a second aspect of this experience that is so pivotal to young Dr. King is the fact that some University of Pennsylvania law students go and test the place because King and his friends are going to file a lawsuit based on that anti-discrimination law. These white University of Pennsylvania law students test the place, they are served, and then when push comes to shove, they back down. I think Dr. King has many learning experiences, both in Pennsylvania and Boston, of segregation being a national problem, not a regional problem, but also the kind of limits of northern liberalism at home. These students decide it's not good for their career, and so they won't testify. The case doesn't go anywhere.

Brian Lehrer: Your Times article that began with the arrest of Fred Trump was headlined, How New York City Became the Capital of the Jim Crow North.

Dr. Jeanne Theoharis: Right.

Brian Lehrer: Why do you give New York that inglorious distinction? I'll buy it. In your opinion, how did it earn that title?

Dr. Jeanne Theoharis: I think we want to remember that in many ways, the tools of school segregation began in places like New York City and Boston before the Civil War. The tools of excluding Black voters began in states like New York state before the Civil War. Part of what we're writing about in that piece and thinking about the Jim Crow North is thinking about the way that the North actually leads and in many ways develops the tools that the South will then expand and perfect. I also want to jump ahead to Dr. King. Dr. King will call New York City segregated schools the most difficult in the country.

Brian Lehrer: Why?

Dr. Jeanne Theoharis: Why? Because the segregation is so pervasive, and Black activists, including Dr. King, are constantly being gaslit and said, "Oh, no, no, we don't have segregation here. That's a problem in Alabama. That's a problem in Mississippi," or, "You're being unreasonable." One other nerdy fact for everyone, the biggest civil rights demonstration in the country is not the march on Washington in '63. It's the New York City school boycott six months later, in February of 1964, where almost half a million students and teachers stay out of school. This is 10 years after the Brown decision because New York City still does not even have a plan for school desegregation, much less school desegregation.

The New York Times calls that school boycott unreasonable, reckless, and violent. Martin Luther King writes a piece two months later in the Amsterdam News celebrating the school boycott, talking about it as a harvest of conditions that had not been addressed, and how the school boycott is a good tool for exposing, as he writes, the thin veneer of Northern racial self-satisfaction.

Brian Lehrer: You've written about King being focused a lot on the issue of policing-

Dr. Jeanne Theoharis: Absolutely.

Brian Lehrer: -in the North. For example, after the police killing of 15-year-old Jimmy Powell, which led to a six-day uprising here in Harlem, what was King's involvement in that?

Dr. Jeanne Theoharis: Mayor Wagner then invites Dr. King to the city. He thinks that he's going to bring Dr. King to quiet people down. That is not the case. King has a series of meetings with Mayor Wagner where he insists that the officer should be disciplined, that they need a real robust civilian complaint review board, that they need jobs for young people, that they need real school desegregation. Wagner rejects all of it.

To me, this is a really pivotal moment as we get to the holiday tomorrow because Dr. King experienced the ways that Northern officials, Northern liberals rejected him when he called out their own segregation, but five months later, when he gets the Nobel Prize, Mayor Wagner celebrates him, gives him a big party at the Ritz, but doesn't listen to anything he's saying regarding New York City.

Brian Lehrer: Next stop on the timeline, 1968. Now we pivot to our other guest. Dr. King is of course assassinated in Memphis, obviously in the South, but Rev. Dr., not yet a reverend doctor, Jacqui Lewis, you are an eight-year-old in Chicago. Would you give us some more detail of where you were and what your life was like at that time and describe a little of what you experienced after April 4th, 1968?

Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis: April 4th, 1968. I'm a fifth grader. I've skipped a grade. My mom and dad have raised us that education is the thing that's going to save us. They've exposed us to Dr. King's teachings. I'm on a field trip out in the suburbs. We get back on the bus to go back home and my teacher, Dr. Smith, who grew up in Mississippi with my mother and her sister, is devastated. He's crushed, he's crying, and we find out that Dr. King is dead.

Chicago was a place where lots of African Americans had immigrated to the North. It was like Mississippi North. It erupted in fear and violence, shooting fires were burning. It was a really sad and scary day. Those fires frightened me as a child. I hid under my bed from fire and gun shooting, but I felt that day that I was called to be a drum major for peace. It's a very personal sense of calling. I tell that story now, as we know, the whole nation's going quote a lot of Dr. King stuff, but especially I have a Dream.

They're going to nicen him up. They're going to remember that he was a non-violent person, and they're going to say a couple of things that feel profound and they are not going to deepen their own sense of calling to put the fires out. America is on fire. America is on fire, and the fire is caused by white supremacy masquerading as Christianity.

[applause]

Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis: America is on fire with white Christian nationalism, and though the fire starters are not wearing hoods, they're still starting the fires. They're still burning the cross in the name of a white Jesus that they've created, who's a mascot to white power. This was a-- Brian, that they could kill love, that they could assassinate a person who was only doing love broke my soul in half, and I committed my life as a child to be a person who is a breach repairer.

Brian Lehrer: Wow.

[applause]

Brian Lehrer: Every year in our WNYC Apollo Theater event, we try to take an aspect of Dr. King's life or work that may or may not be well known and build conversations around it. Our theme this year, as has been stated, is "A Burning House": MLK and the American Experiment. That burning house quote comes from a conversation Dr. King once had with Harry Belafonte. Coincidentally, I see that just last month, you wrote an article in the Amsterdam News called Fierce Love in these Hot Mess Times: Let Us Love Our Nation. That was largely about that exchange with Belafonte and how you think it's been misunderstood.

Would you like to read or paraphrase the quote? I have the quote here if you want me to just read through it, but you can just describe it and talk about how you think it's been misunderstood.

Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis: Thank you so much, Brian. It's such an unpublished and misunderstood quote. In fact, Jeanne and I were talking about this a little bit earlier today. I don't think that Dr. King wanted to be a firefighter, but he understood and was afraid, he said. He said, "I fear," to his friend, Harry Belafonte, "that I've integrated my people into a house on fire." Have you all heard that quote? I've integrated my people into a house of fire. His criticism was about America, that America was then a house on fire.

Surely, he was alluding to the crosses being burned all across the South, again in the name of the white church, the Klan, white supremacy, but on fire with bigotry, on fire with injustice, on fire with a determined sense of keeping people out. Not just Black people, but Black people outside of justice, Chinese people outside of justice, Jewish people outside of justice, Latinx poor farmers outside of justice. That America was built to prop up whiteness.

Y'all know when I say whiteness, I mean white supremacy, white ideology, and that inside that, all of our freedoms burn, our justice burns. We can't make it. We can't survive. A house on fire, he thought he was integrating us into. Harry asked him, "What shall we do?" King wasn't saying don't integrate, but when Harry asked him what to do, he said, "We have to become firefighters." Now, today, that might have an imagination about that as we watch California burn, and as we watch Gaza burn, and as we watch Ukraine burn and Congo and Haiti burn, wars burn.

What does it mean for us to become firefighters, friends? As we go into this holiday observing Dr. King's work, I think the only thing that can dismantle hatred is love. The only thing that can break through the darkness is light. The only thing that can quench these fires is the fiercest love of all.

Brian Lehrer: What does that mean in practical terms?

Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis: Thank you. First of all, y'all, let's stop acting like love is some nammy, pammy, wimpy ethic.

[applause]

Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis: Love made people walk almost a year to work to get the right to ride on the bus. Love made teenagers sit at lunchroom counters and get their head bashed in with ketchup bottles and napkin boxes to desegregate that moment. Love makes people lay down their comfort. Love made people do die-ins in the street to protest the onslaught of Black Death at the hand of the police. Love makes people go marching in the freezing cold so there can be a free Palestine and the hostages can be released. What I'm trying to tell you is love is inconvenient. Fierce love is courageous, and the most important thing is love cannot bear lies. Love cannot bear lies.

[applause]

Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis: Some Christians get it wrong because Paul's, "Love bears all things, believes all things, hope, lala lala la." Love demands truth because the truth is what will set us free.

[applause]

Brian Lehrer: This has been mostly a history segment, but not to ignore the elephant in the room in our last three minutes before they come out here with a hook.

[laughter]

Brian Lehrer: Here we are at this strange confluence of events, Dr. King's holiday and the Trump inauguration. The easy thing to say is King would have been a staunch member of the resistance even after the reelection. More complicated might be to say King was an advocate for poor and working-class people across the lines of color, and working-class people have increasingly been trending Republican, including 30% of Black men under 45 voting for Trump this time, mostly for economic reasons, twice as much as last election, while upper-income people trend increasingly Democratic.

Both Joe Biden and Steve Bannon have railed against the tech industrial oligarchy in the last week. Also, I have plenty of Black callers to my show who are skeptical of mass immigration because low-income immigrants have always been advantaged ahead of them from whatever ethnic group by employers and government policy for rising into prosperity. Do you have a theory on what Dr. King would be saying today, each of you, in about literally one minute each, no more than that, or is it so hypothetical that it's just a stupid question?

[laughter]

Dr. Jeanne Theoharis: I think Dr. King would also remind us of the fire closer to home, which is the politics and policies of New York City, the fact that we just had the governor with the mayor decide to put more police on the subway as opposed to dealing with people's actual needs. I think one of the things that makes Dr. King so courageous is that he called out northern liberals to be liberal at home, he protested both the Democrats and the Republicans. I think that he would be asking us to both look at Washington and look at New York City.

Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis: That's really good, Jeanne. I'm glad you went first.

[laughter]

Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis: Two things, one is King might reiterate love correcting everything that stands against love. I'm paraphrasing that. I'm going to say justice correcting everything that stands against love. That we can't be talking about love, and there's injustice. When we're protesting, we say no justice, no peace. I'm going to say no justice, no love. No love, no justice. They go together. Justice is clear. We know what it looks like, so let's not pretend. Let's do that.

I think the second thing is that he would remind us that we're inextricably connected. That was his way of talking about Ubuntu, "I am human because you're human on the planet. We're inextricably connected, woven in a garment of humanity. I can't be fully who I am until you're fully who you are." Even the Republicans, damn it, we're connected to them, too, but I think because we're connected, we're responsible to tell each other the truth, so I'm going to go back there. We don't pretend like this craziness is truth. We don't pretend like it's not crazy. We don't pretend like the injustice is just. We don't pretend like the bigotry is good. We don't pretend like the economy works, it does not work. We have to be honest about it and call each other into account to build a just society.

Brian Lehrer: Please thank Dr. Theoharris and Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis.

[applause]

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. You have been listening to an excerpt from our annual Martin Luther King weekend event at the Apollo Theater which took place yesterday. There'll be more from that at two o'clock this afternoon in a one-hour special on the station. Thank you to our live audience who was in attendance. I imagine some of you are listening now. It's great to see so many of you out there. Even with the snow falling at the time, you came out.

Coming up next, and of course, we are back live, there is already so much news coming out this morning in advance of the inauguration, last-minute pardons of prominent people by President Biden to protect them from a possible Trump revenge tour in the legal realm and specific things that Trump plans to do very quickly by executive order. Fox News says he will even end US Citizenship for children born in this country to undocumented immigrants.

That would apparently be for future such births, not for people already with birthright citizenship, from the way I read the report. His order would challenge the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which includes birthright citizenship for anyone born here. Will try to keep up with this fast-moving and unusually polarized Inauguration Day with Washington Post columnist Philip Bump right after this.

 

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