FRIDAY

• Home
• Video
• Podcasts/RSS 
• Local Showtimes
• Past Shows
• Blogs
• About the Show
• Tell Tavis
• Features
• Mobile

RELATED LINKS

• Dr. Dyson's official site
• About April 4, 1968: Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Death and How it Changed America
• Dr. Dyson's bio

E-mail a friend

Georgetown University professor discusses Dr. King's lasting legacy. (12:43)
 

Tavis: Michael Eric Dyson is a Professor of Sociology at Georgetown University and the best-selling author of a number of notable books. His latest is called very simply, "April 4, 1968: Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Death and How It Changed America." As always, Mike Dyson, good to have you on the program.

Michael Eric Dyson: Always good to be here with you, Brother Tavis.

Tavis: Glad to have you here and for us both to be in this space. I know you've been here as many times as I've been, maybe more with all the books you've researched about King.

Dyson: Yes, sir.

Tavis: I know what my experience is every time I come. Yours is?

Dyson: It's utter recognition of this man's greatness, to see the small cramped circumstances in the Room 306 where he was upstairs, to see where Dr. King actually had his last meal, slept in his bed next to Ralph Abernathy, his often cell mate, and to see the trauma and the tragedy and ultimately the triumph after the crucifixion. It brings me to tears every time I come here and I've been here so many times, I can't count.

Tavis: What do you mean - I think I know where you're going with this. What do you mean by the triumph after his crucifixion?

Dyson: Well, because the fact is that Dr. King was at the nadir of his popularity in white America. Many people forget that he was at the low point. He didn't even want to speak the night before because, not only was it raining cats and dogs, but Dr. King had become very sensitive to the fact that the white press was writing him off and saying his popularity was down, and it was.

He didn't want to go to an auditorium that was half full because the press would say, "Aha, we told you Dr. King is no longer popular. His causes are being marginalized even within Black America." So that when he was called that night and Ralph Abernathy said, "No, Dr., there are a lot of people here and they're here to hear you," he came out, gave one of the great speeches, if not arguably the greatest speech of his career, then he was ushered immediately into the precincts of martyrdom.

When he was martyred, his liabilities became an asset. Dr. King went from a nuisance to a hero in a matter of an hour. That triumph was the fact that, after his death, the causes to which he gave his life had greater broadcast and publication as a result of his significant death.

Tavis: Let me go back and give you a chance to unpack something you suggested a moment ago. That is that he was not as popular at the end of his life as he had been. As you well know, you wrote the book. He fought off the list of the most admired Americans, uninvited to the White House, "Why I'm Opposed to Vietnam," Lyndon Johnson didn't want to talk to him after that speech, etc., etc.

Dyson: Absolutely.

Tavis: I raise that only because I'm curious from your scholarly mind what you make of the fact that we don't want to wrestle with that part of his life. One gets lost in the conversation about King even forty years later, given that so many of us, even white Americans, don't want to face the part of his message, his sermon, about America's arrogance, about God's judgment on America, about America being a violent place, about the redistribution of wealth. We don't ever want to talk about that.

Dyson: Not at all.

Tavis: My question is, what do we miss out on by not wrestling with that part of his message as opposed to "I Have a Dream"?

Dyson: Well, we miss the radical remnant, the military minority, the prophetic brigade of the Black church, the militancy of the Black church. We assume that, when we hear a Jeremiah Wright, we're hearing something that is extraordinarily outside of the perimeters of Black prophetic church when indeed it's at the heart of it.

After all, Denmark Vesey, Gabriel Prosser, Nat Turner, were insurgent slave ministers who led revolts against slave ministers. Harriet Tubman drew from her religious faith to lead thousands of slaves out of slavery. So the Black church has always, Tavis, been at the heart of the American project of reclaiming Black people from racial injustice and that's the part we miss when we miss the Dr. King challenge to white supremacy.

In his church two months before he died, he said, "God will rise up and break the backbone of your power." He said to a Black congregation, "I don't know about you, but like the Japanese, they might put us in a concentration camp and I've been on the reservation too long." He also said, "Look, America was founded in genocide."

In one sense, comparatively speaking, Jeremiah Wright was playing tiddly-winks compared to what Dr. King said to Black audiences, but one must be careful. He said it to Black audiences because he assumed that a Black universe could understand what he meant. The white society where King's anger and his bitterness against white supremacy didn't play well was beginning to resist him.

So what we miss is the fact that you've got the King Holiday which celebrates his hopeful optimism, his upbeat outlook on life. What you get with the death is much more powerful dealing with poverty, racism and militarism, those three great triplets he talked about. The King Holiday is Christmas; death day is Easter.

Tavis: And yet on either end of that dynamic, of your point, on either end, King always found a way to wrap what he said, this or that, in a love language.

Dyson: Oh, there's no question. There is no question that ultimately even the prophetic declaration that Dr. King meant and said and articulated was always bathed in, resonating in, love because that love that he had was a love that said, "I'm so disappointed in America that I want to measure that love by saying that you got to come from Point A to Point B. You're here now; you've got to get here."

He was not anti-patriotic. A lot of people thought, because he criticized America during the Vietnam War, that like Hanoi Jane, so to speak, Jane Fonda, he was somehow making us more vulnerable. That's the argument made by people now who criticize American foreign policy and the age of terror.

So Martin Luther King, Jr. understood that the greatest patriot is the one who's able to tell the truth about America's faults and failures and griefs, but do so with love. But his anger was motivated by his love as well.

Tavis: What does it mean that he has now been, you make this point in the book, "April 4, 1968," what does it mean, Michael, that he has now been dead longer than he lived and he was assassinated, of course, at thirty-nine?

Dyson: It's stunning. It's stunning to recall the fact that Martin Luther King, Jr. lived only thirty-nine years. People who say you got to wait, people who say that you're too young, people who say that, you know, wait until you grow up and become wise.

If Martin Luther King, Jr. waited until some people thought he was wise enough, he would have never changed the world. So, first of all, it reminds young people to do what you can, while you can. People who are eighteen and nineteen and twenty and twenty-one years old changed America.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was not a lone ranger sending his silver bullet into the hearts of white supremacy. He was part of a broader brigade, the cavalry of relief of Black suffering. So he was a powerful young man, but there were many other young men and young women who accompanied him in that great cavalry of resistance and rebellion.

And it also says to me, Tavis, that forty years is the time of, you know, the people of Israel, the children of Israel looking for the Promised Land. Are they in the wilderness? Are we Black Americans in the wilderness? Are we closer to the Promised Land?

Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "Look, for Black Americans who are rich and those who are wealthy and those who are middle class, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act was great." He said, "But for the most part, it was only a surface change."

That's stunning to hear from Martin Luther King, Jr. He said that, "We have not penetrated the lower depths of Negro deprivation." And that's where we are now. Poverty is on the rise, the Black underclass is still impoverished to a great degree and being neglected and assaulted by people on either hand.

Amnesia and nostalgia have ganged up to really remove us from the challenge Martin Luther King, Jr. gave us. He not only spoke against white supremacy, he spoke against Black people and Black ministers, in particular, who said, "Were more concerned about the wheel base on their automobiles than they were about the congregation's poor." That's something we have to hear right now.

Tavis: Reverend Samuel Billy Kyles, who you talk to many times, the minister in this city to whom - his house is the place where Dr. King was going for dinner that night. Of course, he never made it. But Kyles made the (inaudible) on the program earlier this week that he is just turned on by the fact that all these years later, forty to be exact, there is as much interest in Martin now as there was back in the day. Usually, the longer you've been dead, the more easily forgotten you are.

Dyson: That's absolutely right.

Tavis: What do you make of that? Do you agree with that assessment?

Dyson: Oh, absolutely right. In fact, he's greater now than he ever was.

Tavis: Why is that?

Dyson: Well, because sometimes, Tavis, the contradictions of our lives are swept away by the sweet scent of martyrdom. Martin Luther King, Jr. had the cobwebs cleared away for him in a way that, for instance, Reverend Jesse Jackson has not had, because he's lived as long as Dr. King gave his life to the movement and, as a result of that, your contradictions, your conflicts, your flaws and your foibles, your fragility, is kind of exposed to the world.

Well, Martin Luther King, Jr. is frozen as a young person, like James Dean dying young, like Tupac dying young, JFK or Melvin Monroe. He is frozen now for eternity into that youthful posture and pose of a young Black man who gave his life in defense of the vulnerable and the poor. Now people see that he was right forty years ago.

He spoke out against the war in Vietnam; he was lambasted, then he turned out to be right. He talked about poverty and economic inequality as the means by which Black people would continue to suffer, and he was so right. So not only is he being celebrated because he died early, but he's being celebrated because he was accurate. He was insightful.

He was literally prophetic about the social suffering to which Black people would be subject in this day and age and he continues to be the most resonant voice for the expression of grief in the name of love to speak for the vulnerable to the powerful in the name of a God who identifies with them. That's a powerful combination that we need to continue to look at.

Tavis: Tell me which part of this dialectic is true. We've heard many people say many times that, what's the song, Billy Joel, "Only The Good Die Young"?

Dyson: Yeah.

Tavis: One would look at it as only the good die young. Others think that he died too soon.

Dyson: Right.

Tavis: Did he die too soon? Only the good die young? You know where I'm going. I'm going there because you make the point that, had he lived, all of his shortcomings, his failings, his foibles - because he was human. You've argued in this book and before that that's what made him so great.

He was human, that he overcame that anyway, that he would not let them blackmail him into changing his point of view. But had he lived and all that stuff that we know now had come out in his lifetime, would we not respect Martin the way we did forty years later?

Dyson: Absolutely not. There would be no national birthday. He'd be sitting here talking to you, "Now, young man Tavis, I'm so glad you're having me on your program." He'd be here acknowledging that (laughter). "For an old eighty-year-old man, I'm doing fair to middling, but I'm passing on the highway." That's what he'd be saying to you because he would be a marginal slow-talking, southern cadence Negro who now has to step off the stage.

If they're saying this to Jesse Jackson, a rhetorical genius of extraordinary power at sixty-six, what do you think Martin Luther King, Jr. would endure at eighty years old in an American culture that is addicted to amnesia wrapped in nostalgia? Martin Luther King, Jr. would have been a menace to society. He would have been seen as somebody who was irrelevant.

Look at the eighty-five-year-old Joseph Lowry who stood up on his powerful legs and spoke at the funeral of Coretta Scott King. Even though he still has that rhetorical fire and that prophetic magic, some people were outraged that he would dare speak in the face of President Bush the way he did. That's how Martin Luther King, Jr. would still be.

I think he'd still have his fire, his resistance and his rebellion and he would be marginal. People would say, "Dr. King, you used to say something great. You used to tell America to love white brothers and sisters. Now you're speaking about the economic inequality, social injustice and the persistence of white supremacy" and they wouldn't want to hear him, Tavis.

There is no way in anybody's imagination that Martin Luther King, Jr. would be nearly as widely celebrated or embraced. And how do we know that? Because his legatees are not, because the people who carry forth his tradition are not, because those who speak powerfully are not.

Listen to this. One can argue with Reverend Jeremiah Wright's particular incarnation of the statements he made, but if you put a YouTube of Martin Luther King, Jr. when he was alive speaking to Black congregations, there would be similarly angry statements against the vicious bitterness of the persistence of white supremacy even if he would do it with an extraordinary ground of love.

The fact is that people can't hear the truth of Black life in America. White America cannot hear our grievances or bear the horror of having revealed to them that they have been conspiring against our best interest in the name of God. That's what Martin Luther King, Jr. would be great reminder of. We would rather have a dead prophet who can no longer speak back to us than a living rebel who can tell the truth about us.

That's why we love Muhammad Ali now in broader white America because that mouth, that lip, that used to sting white America with its powerful and abrasive language has now been silenced, so therefore he's been elevated.

Tavis: Yet I could hear somebody saying, "I'd still rather have the living ideas of the dead than the dead ideas of the living."

Dyson: Ain't no doubt about that, brother (laughter).

Tavis: His new book just in time, "April 4, 1968: Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Death and How It Changed America." I highly recommend it. Michael Eric Dyson, nice to have you on the program.

Dyson: Always good to be here, Brother Tavis.