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RELATED LINKS

• Q&A with Professor Rieder
• About The Word of the Lord Is Upon Me
• "40 years later, book explores King's controversial stands"
• Professor Rieder's post on "On Faith"

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Sociologist describes the connection between Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Sen. Barack Obama. (2:12)
 

Tavis: Jonathan Rieder is a professor of sociology at Columbia's Barnard College and a former chair of the school's sociology department. He was also the founding editor of a magazine that examined Black-Jewish relations called "Common Quest." His critically acclaimed new book is called "The Word of the Lord is Upon Me: The Righteous Performance of Martin Luther King, Jr." Professor Rieder, thanks for the book and nice to have you on the program.

Jonathan Rieder: Great to be here.

Tavis: I want to start by excavating this title, if we can. The thing that got me, "The Word of the Lord is Upon Me," I grew up in a Black church, as you might imagine, so I've heard that phrase a thousand times in life. I get that, I think most of my viewers get the fact that, certainly where King is concerned, "the word of the lord is upon me," he's anointed me to preach the gospel and to - we know the scripture.

What got me about the title, though, was - the subtitle - "The Righteous Performance of Dr. King." What do you mean by "righteous performance?"

Rieder: Well, performance can be a tricky word.

Tavis: Exactly.

Rieder: Because it can suggest the notion of duplicity, of sort of not being authentic. And there's a long tradition, of course, of sort of in racist understandings of sort of Black performance, as if the Black is a performer. What I'm getting at is almost all of the ways we express ourself are through the way we perform: through style, through language, all the ways we sort of put our substance into concrete form.

And the idea of the righteousness is that King was able to bring this righteous mission, this anointment to preach the gospel, into so many different kinds of performances - down home and refined, joking around, vulgar and raucous with his preacher buddies or the most lofty theological discourse.

Tavis: Tell me more, then, about why you wanted to write this text, and I ask that because obviously in this, the 40th year of his - we commemorate the 40th year of his assassination, so much has been written about Dr. King, so much said about the man. Did you ever fret that this might be one book too many about King?

Rieder: Oh, absolutely, and there are really a couple of things about that. To write this book required a certain degree of chutzpah and a certain degree of humility. The humility is many smart people have written about the man. What I felt I could do was still missing. The more I was moved by the man and kind of pursued the nuances is to make his words and his talk the focus of what I have done.

Interestingly, other people have dealt with aspects of it, but I wanted to sort of get beyond the iconic King, the King of "I Have a Dream," and look at the King offstage in detail. And so it took me into the recordings of his preaching in Black churches, into his exhorting and mass meetings when he would rally my people. And then interviewing people you've had on this show, certainly; Andrew Young and Joe Lowery and Wyatt Tee Walker.

These remarkable people who knew King in a special way and knew him backstage as a funny tease and a mimic and a hilarious guy beyond the mask of dignity.

Tavis: I was speaking at a commencement - actually a few commencements last week, and in one of those commencement speeches I raised the notion that you just hit on now, that we act as if King only gave one speech in his life - "I Have a Dream." And then we act as if that speech only had one line in it, "that I want my children to live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

We all seem to know that. Not even the rest of the speech, but just that one part of his being a dreamer. Why is it - and I don't mean to be naïve in asking this. I've got my own take on this, but that's not the point. Why is it that you think that we know precious little about the rest of his words, but that "I Have a Dream" is, like, all we know that King ever said?

Rieder: Well, I think two things. One is a practical thing. A lot of the King talk was not easy to get access to. The private communion, when he tells Ebenezer Baptist Church, the congregation, "Oh, I know the temptation," when he lays bare his soul. They were private moments, and it turned out that there were collections of his tape at the King Center and Howard University Divinity School, but it's not like they're circulating widely. And the same was true of the mass meeting talk.

But I think more fundamental is that society at a certain point wanted to create this convenient King, as has been often remarked, and sort of by looking at the dreamer they didn't have to see what was the tough, rough critique he offered of American society. And the word was upon me - he was a prophet decrying poverty and racism and war.

And so I think that society has had an interest, in some sense, of domesticating King and taming him, and in the process really doing an injustice to the richness of that anointment.

Tavis: So that, to your point now, some of that, I talked about it, I've seen other people interviewed talking about this, around this whole Jeremiah Wright scandal vis-à-vis the Obama campaign, a lot of us had the opportunity to better contextualize King for America by talking about, as you do in this book, that other part of King, the part that wasn't just a dreamer, where he really challenged America.

When he called America an arrogant nation, when he talked about God's judgment coming down on this country and breaking the backbone of your power, etc., etc. - all the stuff you note in this text. What do you think that America would make of this man named Martin if they knew the full text of what he had to say about America beyond the dream part?

Rieder: Well, remember that at the end, the larger society had recoiled from King in powerful ways. So as King starts to speak out against the Vietnam War, he knows he's going to get in a smackdown with Lyndon Johnson. And many people in SCLC are saying to King, "Listen, let's focus on Black people and the Black struggle. Let's not take this further into the war. We don't want to fight Lyndon Johnson."

And King says, "You don't know me," he says in one great sermon. "I am a preacher of the gospel. It's not just a matter of caring about Black people; I care about all God's children." So there was just this powerful, powerful dimension moving him and already when King gave that first speech against the Vietnam War, Riverside Church, "The New York Times," "The Washington Post" decried it as almost treasonous.

They were shocked and upset and they almost thought he was being ungrateful to Lyndon Johnson. I think it was the "Post," but one of them said, "The president who's done more for Black rights, how can you take him on?" So already, his prophetic ministry had started to get him into trouble.

Tavis: Since we've mentioned Jeremiah Wright and Barack Obama, there's another issue raised in this book, and I'm glad you raised it because I think there's not enough conversation in America about this right about now, given that it appears that Mr. Obama may be the Democratic Party nominee.

You really do, I think, a great job in this book of talking about how King loved Black people. He never, ever shied away when talking to White people from even using the phrase "my people." "I'm here because of a love I have for my people." He never shied away from that, and yet here's the guy who ends up being regarded as the only African American worthy of a national holiday in his honor.

So maybe there's something instructive here, informative for the Obama campaign. How is it that you never, ever run away from who you are, never run away from your Blackness, you ain't got to be talking about race transcendence or a post-racial this or a post-racial that. King didn't do that, and yet White people, for the most part, at some point, at least, still got him.

Rieder: It's interesting to place Obama in the King lineage in some sense. There's no doubt there's a connection there. Both were seen as post-ethnic or post-racial figures, whatever that means.

Tavis: Obama does it himself.

Rieder: And Obama does it himself. And I think there is a sense, one meaning of post-racial that King might even agree with, but he never saw post-racial as meaning the suppression of your particular sense of "my people," as you say. So on the other hand, look how different they are.

King starts steeped in the Black church in Morehouse College. The man who became the icon of Black and White children (unintelligible) grew up in a primarily all-Black world, in some sense. As he moved out as the crossover artist into White America, he enriched his repertoire, but it started from that home foundation of Blackness. So he never struggled, he never had a hard time accommodating them.

In a way, Obama does the reverse. He starts out as the ultimate fluid character - Kenya and Kansas. He's the ultimate mixture, and has to in a sense adopt his Blackness and acquire his Christianity. So they both end up in this more fluid combinatorial place, if you will, but they come at it in totally different ways, certainly.

Tavis: What, for you, as you had a chance to go through his words, and that's what makes this book uniquely different, you talk about his words, what is it that struck you? You mentioned at the top of our conversation there was something about this man that pulled you in. But as you got into this stuff, what did you just really find yourself turned on by?

Rieder: Well, I could give you two or three instances of King's inventive capacity, the artistry. Because they were thinking of him - remember, he had a day job. What was his day job? I'm a professor. You do what you do in the media. His day job was to produce words in all - that's what he did, hundreds of times a year.

So when we look at those words, we can see his ability. He was the great mix-master and sampler. He could not only mix from the Black folk pulpit and then put in Howard Thurman, the refined, sophisticated Black theologian, and then go to Ovid. And this mixing quality was absolutely unbelievable. He could go high or he could go low.

The funny King, you have to be amazed by. His great tease - again, the artistry of the dozens. Joseph Lowery and Andrew Young told me wonderful stories when I interviewed them, and the great one is King would say, "Now, y'all think they're going to get me first." They all thought that somebody was going to be shot, right? And he thought that.

And he said, "But no, no, no, y'all going to be jumping out in front of the camera, and they're going to get you. But I will preach you the best funeral you ever had." (Laughter) See, Andy Young, Andy Young, "Oh, White people made a terrible mistake - they shot the wrong Negro. Of all my colleagues, no one was your more faithful servant." (Laughter)

So there's the humorous part, but there's an angry part as well, and you see that sometimes in the mass meeting. His relationship to Black anger we haven't thought enough about. King understood anger. He was never weak and sentimental, which is why he always empathized with Black anger.

In this city, not long after the Watts riots, King comes to Mt. Zion Baptist Church and he says, "Oh -" he's got that tremulous "oh" again, his refined version of whooping; a kind of an emotional accent. He says, "Oh, I know the temptation to become bitter at the White man. It comes to all of us." And the "us" is a Black "us." "We've been trampled on for so long."

And that anger could even intensify in mass meetings, and he'd say, "We were here before the White man, way before the pilgrims came to Plymouth Rock. We were here, and the White man, they made our forefathers work for 244 years, didn't pay them a cent." And he goes on to talk about the words of inalienable rights and the Declaration of Independence, and then he stops and says, "The men who wrote that owned slaves."

So the sheer mixture and diversity and intricacy of the man amazes me.

Tavis: Let me close with this. To your point now about how he could talk about what had happened to the Negro in America because of White supremacy, there's also the other part that you well know. He had to navigate his way - how might I put this? Had to navigate his way where even Black folk didn't get him. Even Black folk weren't always supportive of him.

It wasn't just "The New York Times" and "The Washington Post" that wrote him off. The NAACP came out opposed to him when he came out against the war in Vietnam. So even Black people, his words, he had to navigate that as well. What do you make of that?

Rieder: Well, I think this again comes back to what very different people who were close to King all told me. They said, "You want to understand King? Don't read Tillock (sp), don't read Nyber (sp)" - I'm talking about Reverend CT Vivian said this, Walter Fauntleroy - "Read the four books of the gospel if you want to understand him."

And so I think that that commitment to something that was beyond race, as Black as King could be in his sympathy and loyalty and just sheer identity, it never outstripped his commitment to all God's children. And so when he said to Black audiences, "There are hungry White children too. God doesn't like this," I think King's substance always transcended style.

And in that sense, he was always going to make some folks angry because he would not compromise that essential faith.

Tavis: I've said it so many times - I regard Dr. King, as you know, as the greatest American we've ever produced. That's my own assessment. And Jonathan Rieder doesn't think I'm too far off the mark with that. The book is called "The Word of the Lord is Upon Me: The Righteous Performance of Martin Luther King, Jr." Professor Rieder, thank you so much for the text and thanks for coming on the program.

Rieder: Tavis, thank you very much.

Tavis: It's my pleasure.