Trump lawlessness, DOGE/DOJ target non-profit, Sen. Van Hollen returns, MLK struggles in the North

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:21):
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Apparance moment that we have.

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Now we have to keep this going. The video looks phenomenal.

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Visit between Black Star Network and Black owned media and
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It's time to be smart.

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Bring your eyeballs home.

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It did.

Speaker 4 (02:22):
Today Friday, April eighteen, twenty twenty five, coming up on
rollingd Mark Unfiltered streaming Live with the Black Star Network,
Folks who haven't made it to the first one hundred
days and the twice impeached, grimly convicted felon in chief
Donald macn Trump has unleashed lawlessness all across the country.

Speaker 3 (02:41):
Jen A. Nelson, the President director.

Speaker 4 (02:42):
Council the Legal Defense Fund, will explain that although Trump's
tactics aren't new, they can be stopped. Federal judges are
doing their part ruing against Trump left and right.

Speaker 3 (02:56):
A lot of people will fear if the courts were
not going to do their part. Oh, but they are.

Speaker 4 (03:00):
According to the non profit organization at Vera Institute, it
was targeted by.

Speaker 3 (03:04):
Trump's dj N doge, setting a troubling.

Speaker 4 (03:07):
Precedent for targeting nonprofits that receive federal funding. The Maryland
city of Chris van Holland just returned from Bill Salvador,
where he finally met the Maryland man who was wrongfully
deported by Trump. Plus, I talked with Jean Phil Harris
about her new book King of the North, Martin Luther King,
Junior's life of struggle outside of the South. The book

(03:30):
focuses on King's experiences in places like Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston,
and others. That's the influence is campaign for racial justice.
It's a lot to unpack and it is time to
bring the funk on rolling unfiltered on the Black Star Network.

Speaker 3 (03:46):
Let's go.

Speaker 9 (03:49):
Whatever it is. God fine, Helena plays, He's right on top.
Best believe he's Loston houst to politics with entertainment, just balcakes.

Speaker 1 (04:06):
He's stolen, it's roll in. He's Punky Spress, she's real.
The question, No, he's rolling Monte.

Speaker 3 (04:38):
Folks.

Speaker 4 (04:39):
Been eighty eight days since the twice in peach criminally
convicted felon in chief down the con Trump occupied the
White House.

Speaker 3 (04:46):
During these eighty eight days.

Speaker 4 (04:47):
He is abused in a massive way of presidential power
by dismissing individuals from federal boards, laying off thousands of
employees under the pretext of saying the government needs the
money to fund over our operations, openly disregarding court orders
and unlawfully deporting individuals, and also just completely saying they're

(05:07):
not going to comply with court orders.

Speaker 3 (05:10):
It's been a fierce.

Speaker 4 (05:12):
Battle fighting against him, especially in the federal court system.
Jenay Nelson, the President director of Council of the Legal
Defense Fund, or an op ed in the nation called
we can defeat Trump's lawlessness. We've done it before.

Speaker 3 (05:24):
She joins me.

Speaker 4 (05:25):
Right now, Jennay, glad to have you here. You layout
that it can be defeated. Let's unpack that because just
we saw today even in the very very conservative Fifth Circuit,
that judges have been nailing Trump on how they are

(05:47):
abusing power, just deporting folks for the hell of it.

Speaker 1 (05:51):
That's right.

Speaker 10 (05:52):
What is happening is so egregious that you see some
of our staunchest, most conservative, of the most extreme circuits
and judges recognizing that our constitution, our democracy, the rule
of law itself is at stake because it is being
abused so plainly, in plain sight, with zero restraint. And

(06:17):
if there's any fidelity to the rule of law. If
there's any interest in keeping this country from devolving into
a full out autocracy, the courts have to step in
and enforce the law and recognize that no one is
above the law. Even if this president thinks that he
has full immunity, he still cannot engage in unlawful conduct

(06:41):
without a check by these courts. And certainly the people
in his administration don't enjoy the same immunity that he does.
So what they're doing at his behest and at his direction,
is putting them their lives, their livelihoods, their licenses at
risk because in many instances they are engaged in civil
rights violations, potentially human rights violations, and misconduct that can

(07:06):
lead them into potential criminal conviction. So this is serious business,
and I'm glad to see that the courts are stepping
up and stepping in.

Speaker 3 (07:15):
So here's what's interesting. Right now.

Speaker 4 (07:17):
You've got Democrats saying it is wrong for Democrats to
be focused on people like the man who was deported
to El Salvador. Senator Chris van Holland traveled there to
meet with this man. They're saying, oh, no, no, no,
you should ignore those things. But the courts are hitting

(07:38):
them left and right now. I know the LDF is
a nonpartisan group, but to me that sounds idiotic. If
you believe in the rule of law, if you believe
in the Constitution, then as as congswel and Barbara Jordan
said in the water Gate you're hearings, my faith in
the Constitution is whole and it is complete, and I
will not stand idly by and watch people abuse this.

Speaker 3 (08:02):
To me, that's crazy advice.

Speaker 10 (08:05):
Yeah, you know, as you said, LDF is nonpartisan. We
don't give political advice. What we do is say what
the law requires, and the law requires that every single
person has a right to do process, has a right.

Speaker 1 (08:19):
To be treated equally under the law, should not be
subject to human and civil rights abuses.

Speaker 10 (08:25):
And the problem that we are in right now as
a country is this very self centered approach to rights
and to protections. And we have to realize that if
we are serious about the principles that hold this country
apart from many others, or at least used to that,
it doesn't matter who is being targeted.

Speaker 1 (08:47):
What matters is whether the principle that we believe in.

Speaker 10 (08:50):
Is being abused, if it's being ignored, if it's being weaponized,
and we should not care against whom that is happening.

Speaker 1 (08:58):
We should simply care that it is happening. I'd like
to believe that all of us.

Speaker 10 (09:02):
Believe that every human is created equal and deserves those
protections and rights. But even if you don't believe that,
the fact that these principles are being weaponized should be
of concern to all of us. That this government has
turned itself against its people is one of the most
concerning developments in the evolution of.

Speaker 1 (09:24):
This democracy in modern history.

Speaker 10 (09:27):
We are in uncharted orders, and this idea that our
democracy is unraveling or maybe under authoritarian our fascist threat
is no longer a notion. It is a clear and
present danger that is actively unfolding.

Speaker 1 (09:45):
In front of us.

Speaker 4 (09:46):
Well, I'm shitty here looking at I follow Cayle Chainel
political on Twitter.

Speaker 3 (09:50):
So just two hours ago, he said justinging.

Speaker 4 (09:52):
Lawyers for Venezuelan nationals say they're being loaded onto buses
this hour in anticipation of a new wave of alien
enemies at the deportations with less than twenty four hours notice.
They're asking Judge Bolsburg for any immediate restraining order requiring
thirty days notice. They don't believe in do process. They
don't believe in people following the process.

Speaker 3 (10:14):
We saw we had that. We ran a video the
other day.

Speaker 4 (10:18):
Of people people thought was someone with ICE who was
breaking the window of a man, and we find out
that he was actually with a militia group.

Speaker 3 (10:27):
I mean he was not actually with ICE.

Speaker 4 (10:30):
I mean what Trump is doing, he is giving these
people permission to essentially kidnap folks.

Speaker 1 (10:41):
That's right. We're seeing live kidnappings. We're seeing live abductions.

Speaker 10 (10:46):
We're seeing people being pulled off the street without any explanation,
without anyone giving any id and if anyone is confronted
with that circumstance.

Speaker 1 (10:56):
They don't know what to do.

Speaker 10 (10:57):
They don't know if this is lawful conduct of people
who are licensed and deputized with the authority to confront them,
or if these are rogue criminal actors. And in many
instances we're seeing, as you pointed out, a confluence of both.
At the same time, we are in dangerous times, and

(11:18):
this is anyone.

Speaker 1 (11:19):
If you are perceived to be someone who might.

Speaker 10 (11:23):
Be an immigrant, or you might not have lawful papers
or citizenship here, you could be a target. And we're
seeing with each passing day that every citizen in this
country is closer to being under threat. An actual citizen
was mistakenly detained by Ice and had to be returned.

(11:45):
We're seeing a refusal by the government in El Salvador
to return mister Garcia.

Speaker 1 (11:52):
Abrigo, mister Garcia.

Speaker 3 (11:55):
Part of.

Speaker 10 (11:56):
It's unbelievable the level of incompetence and intentional harm and
violence that's being inflicted by this government. And even when
they recognize that they've done something wrong, they are not
taking adequate steps to undo that harm and to retract
their efforts and actions.

Speaker 1 (12:18):
So we are in very, very rogue.

Speaker 10 (12:21):
Territory and we should be crying out in protest, and
we should be calling on every elected official to do
what Representative Van Holland has been doing and what other
representatives have been saying. Representative Garcia, with whom I was
in conversation last night, and so many others have actually
been speaking out, and we need to amplify those voices.

Speaker 3 (12:44):
This right here is amazing.

Speaker 4 (12:46):
Have you ever in your legal career seeing a judge
write this, and this is a three judge panel, a
Reagan appointing, and this is regarding mister Garcia.

Speaker 3 (13:00):
The man from Maryland.

Speaker 4 (13:01):
The judge rights, it is difficult in some cases to
get to the very heart of the matter, but in
this case it is not hard at all. The government
is asserting a right to stash away residents of this
country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process
that is the foundation of our constitutional order.

Speaker 3 (13:19):
Further, it claims in.

Speaker 4 (13:20):
Essence that because it has rid itself of custody, if
there's nothing that can be done.

Speaker 3 (13:25):
This should be shocking not.

Speaker 4 (13:27):
Only to judges but to the intuitive sense of liberty
that Americans, far removed from courthouses still hold. Dear, the
government asserts that Abragio Garcia, as a terrorist and a
member of MS thirteen, perhaps but perhaps not regardless, he
is still entitled to due process. If the government is
confident of his position, it should be assured that position

(13:48):
will prevail in proceedings to terminate the withholding of removal order.
I mean, these judges are literally themselves shocked at what
they are witnessing and to have doj officials lawyers walk
into their courtrooms and literally say we're not going to

(14:12):
follow your order. The Supreme Court ruled nine to zero
against Trump. He is out of here, going oh no, no, no,
they ruled in our favor.

Speaker 10 (14:21):
Yeah, well, we know, we know that this administration traffics
in lies and falsehoods. You know that they will look
directly into a camera and tell you that what is
up is down, what is left is right, and what
is wrong is also right.

Speaker 1 (14:36):
And we are much smarter than that.

Speaker 10 (14:39):
We have to be discerning and as media professionals, as
you do all the time, media has to call it out.

Speaker 1 (14:47):
They have to name a lie a lie. And that's
what we're seeing.

Speaker 10 (14:51):
It defies exactly what was written in these court statements
and court orders. And many people have talked about us
approaching a constitutional crisis.

Speaker 1 (15:00):
We are having that crisis right now.

Speaker 10 (15:02):
And this crisis will only worsen unless this administration sees
that there are actual consequences. They're going to be held
in contempt of court. They may face actual fines, and
if they continue to defy these court orders, they may
face even more severe sanctions. And this is necessary if

(15:23):
they're going to ignore an entire third branch of government.
When the Constitution established this tripartite system so that we
have checks and balances, we can't have one branch, the
executive branch cancel out all others, and that's what's happening
right now. Everyone must rain this in, including Congress, because

(15:46):
if this administration continues to go too far, which it
already has, in my view, we.

Speaker 1 (15:50):
Need to be talking about impeachment. This is clear, This
is clear.

Speaker 10 (15:54):
This president and his administration are violating all sorts of laws.

Speaker 1 (16:00):
When these are grounds for impeachment.

Speaker 4 (16:03):
I know y'all have been focused on this as well.
And in order to win, you need folks who are
willing to fight. And when you have major law firms
capitulating cutting deals with Donald Trump because he's issuing frankly
illegal executive orders targeting law firms, that can happen. Universities

(16:24):
are buckling as well. Thankfully Harvard and my teen others
are fighting back. But in order to come back lawlessness,
you've got to have people who are not afraid to fight.

Speaker 10 (16:34):
Not afraid to fight, not afraid to enforce the law,
not afraid to honor their oath to the profession that
they sought to enter for which we took an exam
and completed an oath to uphold our constitution. So it
is deeply disturbing, deeply disturbing as a lawyer, as a

(16:55):
person who has fought for civil rights for decades, who
represents an institution and the Legal Defense Fund that has
used the law and the power of law and research
and people in nonviolent, peaceful ways to help evolve this
country for over eighty five years.

Speaker 1 (17:12):
It is one of the most.

Speaker 10 (17:15):
Concerning matters at this moment to see the legal profession buckle. However,
there are more of us who have stood firm than
have buckled, and we shouldn't.

Speaker 1 (17:25):
Lose sight of that.

Speaker 10 (17:26):
There was an amicus brief that the Legal Defense Fund
filed in support of Perkins Couy and Wilmer Hale and
General Block, three law firms that are actually litigating against
the Trump administration because of their lawless executive orders. And
we're proud to stand with those law firms and to
remind the courts that not only is what is happening

(17:49):
unlawful in this moment, but it harkens back to a
time period where organizations like ours and civil rights lawyers
in the South were harmed and threatened, and there were
attempts to intimidate us from pursuing what we knew what
was right under the law, from pursuing our efforts to
end legal apartheid in this country, and we stood firm

(18:11):
and we prevailed. And that's what these law firms and
lawyers must do today. When you face lawlessness in the eye,
it is your obligation to use the power of law
to defeat that lawlessness, that effort to undermine everything that
we stand for and why we came into this profession

(18:34):
in the first place, because if we don't hold the line,
we will quickly descend into a space that is irretrievably
harmful for our citizens and frankly for the entire future
of this country, our national security, our national standing. Really,
it is a slipery slope into a true spiral that

(18:56):
I don't know we will ever recover from if we
don't start to gain hold of it.

Speaker 4 (19:00):
And you know, it's always amazing, Janey and say, I
tell people of this all the time. It's always amazing
when people finally wake up and realize what's going on.
New York Times columnist David Brooks, conservative columnist, drop this
and it says, what's happening is not normal. America needs

(19:22):
an uprising that is not normal. And he goes on
and he writes about how Empires died and then he said,
Trump is am is threatening all of that. It is
primarily about the acquisition of power, power for its own sake.
It is a multi front assault to make the earth
a playground for ruthless men. So of course any institutions

(19:44):
that might restrain power must be weakened or destroyed.

Speaker 3 (19:47):
Trump Ism is.

Speaker 4 (19:48):
About ego, appetite, and acquisitiveness, and it's driven by a
primal aversion to the higher elements of the human spirit, learning, compassion,
and scientific one of the p justice when you see
the capitulation of media, unwilling to do stores, when you see, oh,
let's cut deals with Trump so our mergers can go through.

Speaker 3 (20:12):
And who cares if he's suing.

Speaker 4 (20:14):
Us because sixty minutes interviewed Vice President Kamlin Harris or
ABC cutting their deal and the money going to his library.
What this is about is let me break any institution
that could shine a light upon me. You know, when

(20:35):
I do this show, I'm literally sitting across from this
portrait of Ida b Wells Barnett, and it hangs at
our studio. Otto by w Wells Barnett is Harry Belafonte,
and it's James Baldwin. And every time I see that
Oda b Wells Barnett photo and it's get a shot

(20:56):
of that. The quote that she has is right there
when she talks about the way the way to see
truth is shine of light upon the darkness in media.
If there's a moment where media has to be willing
to challenge power, this is it. If there's any a

(21:19):
moment where media has to inform the public of what's
going on, this is it. When people hit me and go,
you know what, man, y'all keep talking about Trump and Maga,
that's just enough. I'm like, no, it's not if you
don't understand that what is happening literally is about impacting
the next fifty to one hundred years, a total destruction

(21:43):
of civil rights. That's what we are fighting. We are
fighting literally for the next two to three generations.

Speaker 1 (21:54):
I could not agree more Roland.

Speaker 10 (21:56):
So you know you said, when people wake up, what
will they what will they see? And that's why there
was this quote unquote war on woke, because they want
people to remain asleep, to have their eyes closed to
the criminality, to the corruption, to the destruction that.

Speaker 1 (22:18):
We are seeing play out. Those of us who knew
this was coming, those of us who saw the signs
of it.

Speaker 10 (22:23):
Those of us who have been screaming about the embers
of white nationalism that are still burning in this country
and now are a flame.

Speaker 1 (22:34):
We knew this was happening.

Speaker 10 (22:36):
That is why there are all of these efforts to
ban books, to put limitations on protest, to stop people
from being able to vote. There is an effort to
take away all the levers of power, all the potential
accountability of government, to take it and wrest it from the.

Speaker 1 (22:58):
Hands of the people, and to put it in the
hands of a.

Speaker 10 (23:03):
Very small, increasingly wealthy minority of people who do not
have this country's interests at heart at all. It's only
self interest, self aggrandizement, self serving, self dealing that is
happening on the part of many in this administration, and

(23:24):
so it is incumbent upon the media to lay those
truths bare. This transcends party, This transcends politics. We're talking
about basic fundamental rights. We're talking about whether the United
States of America as we have known it for the
past sixty and nearly two hundred and fifty years, whether

(23:45):
it's going to continue to exist, whether we're going to
continue to be in a free society, and We can
continue to debate all sorts of policies, we can continue
to have partisan politics and all sorts of things where
we agree to disagree, But one thing we must stand
united on is whether we want the United States of

(24:07):
America to continue to exist, because that is the threat
that we're facing. And so many people have been sounding
this alarm, and I'm glad that more people are waking
up to that piercing sound, and I hope it won't
be too late before everyone recognizes the enormity of the
threat that we face.

Speaker 4 (24:27):
And this is one of the reasons why we have
said on this show, this is not a moment to rest,
This is not a moment to check out. This is
not a moment for folks to say, hey, you know what,
that's someone else's fight, because what is happening will impact
every single one of us.

Speaker 1 (24:44):
That's absolutely right. Everyone has to get engaged. Everyone has
a role to play.

Speaker 10 (24:48):
I don't care what your position is, where you're located,
what your identity is. You have a contribution to make
in this effort to save our democracy. In this war
against freedom, this war against truth, this war on education.
Everybody has a role to play, and that can be

(25:08):
any number of things, including how you spend your money,
including how much you hold your elected officials and your
representatives to account, including your ability just to educate your
neighbors and friends and reach out and call people into
this fight. It's imperative that each one of us find
a role to play, because whether you think you're in

(25:29):
this or not, you absolutely are.

Speaker 1 (25:31):
No one is exempt.

Speaker 3 (25:32):
Indeed, indeed JD. Nelson appreciate it.

Speaker 1 (25:34):
Thanks a lot, Thank you, Roland.

Speaker 4 (25:36):
Folks going to break we write back Roland Martin unfiltered
right here on the Blackstore Network.

Speaker 8 (25:43):
Next on the Black Table with me, Greg call the
enormous impact of race education and deffirmative action in America
and how, believe it or not, white America is starting
to feel a little bit of the bank. Doctor Natasha
Warrick who joined us with a case study of one
suburban community and how it reacted when the minority students

(26:06):
started to accept and most.

Speaker 1 (26:08):
People didn't say this explicitly, but was that, you know.

Speaker 11 (26:11):
The academics are getting standards are getting.

Speaker 5 (26:13):
Higher in part because of the Asian kids, and that
is making our.

Speaker 1 (26:18):
Kids really stressed out.

Speaker 5 (26:19):
So we need to reduce the amount of homework teachers
are allowed to.

Speaker 1 (26:23):
Assign.

Speaker 8 (26:24):
She shares a perspective that you don't want to miss.
That's on the next Black Table, only on the Black
Star Network.

Speaker 12 (26:33):
Hey, this is Motown recording artist Kim.

Speaker 3 (26:35):
You are watching Roland Martin unfiltered?

Speaker 11 (26:39):
Boy?

Speaker 3 (26:40):
He always unfiltered though I ain't never known him to
be filtered? Is there an is there another way to
experience rolland Martin than to be unfiltered? Course, he's unfiltered.

Speaker 12 (26:48):
Would you expect anything less? Watch? Watch what happens next, Folks.

Speaker 4 (27:03):
My panel Michael motep hosts African History Networks show Our
Detroit Cannons, Kelly Legal analyst her hosts Not All Hoods,
South Orange, New Jersey, Matt Manning, civil rights attorney Corpus
Christi Texas Cannons. Want to start with you. You heard
what Jane had to say right there, and you know
this is a moment where the law matters above the

(27:23):
Supreme Court is equal justice under law, and what we
are seeing, we are literally seeing judges Conservative judges, Reagan
appointed judges, Trump appointed judges.

Speaker 3 (27:39):
Say the hell is going on?

Speaker 4 (27:42):
There is a thing called the constitution and you cannot
ignore it just because you got elected.

Speaker 5 (27:49):
Yeah, there's a thing called the Fifth Amendment. There's a
thing called the fourteenth Amendment.

Speaker 13 (27:53):
There's a thing called due process, which we have never
ignored in our country in terms of not having someone.

Speaker 1 (27:59):
Respond with you.

Speaker 5 (28:00):
Not have ignored it, but not on this level.

Speaker 13 (28:02):
And I think what's really interesting is that normally you
go through the court system, right, and you figure out
if you need to ultimately go to the Supreme Court
of the land, the United States Supreme Court. You get
your answer, and it trickles down, whether it's civil rights
or whether it's segregation or gay marriage. The Supreme Court speaks,
and then everybody listens. Now, this is precedent. I mean,

(28:24):
we've talked about some things that have been unprecedented that
Trump has done, but we've seen them in some way,
shape or form from other people. This right here before
last week, if you're talking about a nine to zero decision,
that in and of itself is almost an anomaly these days,
especially when you have conservative justices that outweigh the liberal justices.

(28:45):
Now we've got the decision, and what happens, Trump completely
ignores it. This is why people should be paying attention.

Speaker 3 (28:53):
Now.

Speaker 13 (28:53):
It was really different last week. It used to be
wait and see what the court said. Now the courts
have spoken and nobody's listening. So what's really important is
is that if Trump is saying we need a separation
of these powers and this is our international rights that
we have to deal with things on an international level,

(29:14):
well then Congress has to do their job and say, well,
if we're separated as we are, then they have to
do their job to make something happen otherwise.

Speaker 5 (29:23):
Otherwise.

Speaker 13 (29:24):
This isn't just precedents for people who are taken off
the streets and go tell Salvador. This is a precedent
for anything else that Trump wants to do. When he
says the Supreme Court has spoken, but you know what,
I'm just going to ignore it, just like I did
in the case of Garcia. That's what this is about.
It's not just about Garcia. It is such a big

(29:45):
picture everybody. If you think it's not going to affect you,
this is the time to be paying attention. History just happened.
This is precedent that we have never ever seen.

Speaker 3 (29:56):
It is crazy to me, Matt when you look at.

Speaker 4 (30:01):
Decisions, when you look at just the flat out line,
you know, one of the people who I mean, he
just and again to work for Trump means that you
have to be a massive liar yourself, and that is
the despicable white nationalist Stephen Miller, listen to this.

Speaker 3 (30:23):
We'll ask you.

Speaker 14 (30:24):
About you mentioned Bukela in the fact that Garcia is
now in El Salvador's custody.

Speaker 1 (30:29):
But the question is, as President Trump expressed any.

Speaker 14 (30:32):
Interest at all in seeing Garcia moved to a different
country or would he want him to stay in El Salvador,
did you discuss that with the Pella or any of
his advisors, specifically with Integrat Well, the.

Speaker 15 (30:43):
Supreme Court has been abundantly clear when it overturned the
lower course ruling that the foreign policy of the United
States cannot be compelled by district court.

Speaker 6 (30:54):
The view of our administration has been very clear and.

Speaker 16 (30:57):
Consistent that this man is a subject of citizen of
Ol Salvador, and Al Salvador as a sovereign country, has
informed us repeatedly and publicly that is their desire and
intention to retain custody of him, and of course we
as a US government cannot forcibly retrieve them against the
witches of old Salvage.

Speaker 3 (31:17):
Matt He's lying is that what Supreme court said he's
lying for not lying.

Speaker 7 (31:24):
That's also why we have extradition.

Speaker 17 (31:26):
We have an entire process whereby sovereigns recognize the sovereignty
of another country, but also recognize their own sovereignty insofar
as they're able to retrieve their citizens under certain circumstances.
We know Miller is not being honest. And it's interesting
because we focus so much on mister Trump because he
is the one who is the president, but it's people

(31:47):
like Stephen Miller who are really driving the ship with
this insane policy. And it's terrifying that they are really
trying to justify what they've already admitted was a mistake
that does not have any basis in fact. And if
you noticed the moment that it came out that their
lawyer admitted that they made a mistake and he was
an administrative error, paperwork er, or however they framed it,

(32:10):
they then tried to pivot and start saying, well, he's
a member of MS thirteen and heron and exactly what
you see them do to black people. Very often, when
we have any kind of criminal issue that's in the
national zeitgeist, they immediately just start making ad HOMINYMS on
mister garcia As though to Candas's earlier point, he's not
afforded the due process rights that any one of the

(32:33):
United States of America is. Even those who are naturalized
citizens or those who have some authorization to be here
and are not fully naturalized citizens, they're due process. You
don't just get to spirit someone away and divest them
of their opportunity to go in front of a judge
and disprove what the government's allegations are.

Speaker 7 (32:51):
And that's what we're seeing here.

Speaker 17 (32:52):
We're seeing not only something unprecedented, but we're seeing something
that is offensive to the fundamental ethos of this country.
The idea that you get to stand in front of
a judge and say, make the government prove it what
they're saying is not true. Instead, the government whisked this
man away and then is now, you know, thumbing its
nose at federal judge telling them to kick rocks, which

(33:12):
is not only unprecedented, but frankly, it upsets our entire
system of the courts, because the courts, frankly are like
our currency. They're basically fiat courts, meaning they only have
authority to the extent that we recognize they have authority
the moment, the most powerful person in the world says,
I don't recognize their authority.

Speaker 7 (33:31):
That authority is forever marred and really undermined. And that's
what we're seeing.

Speaker 17 (33:37):
And the sad reality is all of the defendants and
all of the litigants who go into a federal courthouse
now still have to adhere to the judge, despite the
fact and the judge's orders, despite the fact that the
President of the United States is telling the judges to
kick rocks and openly calling for their impeachment and other
kind of you know, negative actions toward them. So we're
in an unprecedented space and one that fundamentally shifts how

(34:00):
the country exists.

Speaker 4 (34:02):
Michael, you can see right here this is the New
York Times, and how this is on the White House
Twitter feed. How they mocked this up, and they strike
strike out wrongly, They strike out Maryland man put in
in this thirteen and legal alien, and then they go,
Who's never coming back, even though even though the Supreme

(34:22):
Court a firm decision that they have to facilitate the
return of this man. The sheer arrogance of this is astounding.
And again, what their goal is if they can break
the courts. Then they have a wide of impathway to
do whatever they want.

Speaker 18 (34:43):
Yeah, Roland, this is what white nationalism unleashed looks like
and the lawlessness of it. After the Department of Justice
admitted that he was wrongly taken out of the country

(35:04):
in defiance of US Supreme Court ruling nine nothing ruling
including the three justices that Donald Trump nominated.

Speaker 3 (35:14):
This is what you're looking at.

Speaker 18 (35:15):
And you have some people who say, Okay, we're in
a constitutional crisis right now because you have Donald Trump
and the Department of Justice defying and u a Supreme
Court decision.

Speaker 7 (35:29):
But I would push back.

Speaker 18 (35:32):
And say we entered into a constitutional crisis at twelve
noon on January twentieth, twenty twenty five, when a man
who incited the insurrection in violation of section three to
fourteenth Amendment was inaugurated as president. Even though the US
Supreme Court came up with the ruling that the Fourteenth.

Speaker 3 (35:50):
Amendment doesn't say.

Speaker 18 (35:51):
They said that state government does not have the authority
to remove somebody from the ballot for a federal election.
The US got Stitution doesn't say that they just made
some ship up. But you know so, but hashtag we
try to say this is what we want people about.
So this is this is a severe fight right here.

(36:11):
So we're gonna have to continue to file lawsuits, continue
to organize. What Senator Chris van Holland did was very courageous,
I think, okay, and this puts a lot of pressure
on the Departminent Justice, on Donald Trump, but also on
our Salvador El Salvador as well.

Speaker 3 (36:33):
So we have to continue to fight fighting.

Speaker 4 (36:45):
Uh. The The Verra Institute Justice, an organization dedicated to
ending mass coross RATIONI and enhance the community safety, recently
reported that they were contacted by Elon Muski's Department of
Government Efficiency, you know that fake Department of Acording to Verra,
DOGE intended to assign a team to work with them
and plan to do the same with every nonprofit receiving

(37:07):
federal funding. However, Vera's legal team pushed back, questioning Doge's
legal authority to investigate them, especially since the Justice Department
had recently discontinued it's grants to VERA.

Speaker 3 (37:19):
As a result, DOGE with drew its requests.

Speaker 4 (37:21):
In Sho Raman, the vice president of Advocacy and Partnerships
at the Vera Institute, Joneses right.

Speaker 3 (37:26):
Now, and I this is utterly insane.

Speaker 4 (37:34):
This notion that Elon Musk can insert himself into nonprofits,
federal agencies, USAID, into law firms. This idea that we
have the authority to not only look at grants, but
go inside of institutions and essentially dry take them over.

Speaker 19 (38:00):
It is insane and it is dangerous. It's such dangerous precedent. So,
as you said, Boland, we were contacted by DOGE, and
we believe that they thought they can come in and
take over our organization because we have historically received federal
funding to do the important mission driven work we do

(38:23):
to end mass incarceration, to fight for immigrant rights, and
to build safe, thriving communities. Now, the very Institute of
Justice is a sixty four year old national organization. Many
of your viewers might not have heard of us, but
we have been around doing this work with government partners
and communities across the country in red states, blue states,

(38:44):
and everywhere in between, to actually make sure that our
communities are safer and that we are investing in the
services and programs that help people thrive. Now, none of
that should be controversial, and yet when we received an
of termination of our federal funding two fridays ago from
the Department of Justice. They told us they were cutting

(39:06):
our funding because your priorities and your work no longer
fits within the agency's purview. Now, what we did immediately
was write an open letter to Attorney General Bondie to
call out the hypocrisy of cutting funding for services. And
I'll tell you exactly the grants that we got what
they were supporting. They were supporting our work with prisons

(39:29):
to make them safer and to make sure there's dignity
for correctional staff and for people who are incarcerated, to
make sure that law enforcement knows how to provide services
for survivors of domestic violence and crime, and to make
sure that in communities where people are in mental health crisis,
we actually provide services and the right response. All of

(39:52):
that should be non controversial, and yet we were targeted
for our federal funding to be cut.

Speaker 1 (39:57):
So the question is why.

Speaker 19 (40:00):
It's because VERA works on immigration and crime, the two
issues that are easily caricatured by the right. We have
been in right wing media circles sort of a constant
punchline of these defund the police and open border liberals
funded by George Soros, even though we are none of
those things. And so when we called out the Attorney

(40:23):
General and asked for her to reconsider her decision, we
knew we might be opening ourselves up for attack. We
did not expect DOGE to come knocking, and yet they did.
And so it's just wild to us that this is
how this administration is operating. And it's wild to us

(40:43):
that a Department of Government Efficiency that was literally set
up to say, let's look at government agencies is coming
knocking on the door of an independent nonprofit organization.

Speaker 4 (40:55):
Well, what's weird is okay, what your organization does? I
thought that supposedly dovetails with the First Step Act. Donald
Trump is always taking credit for that, so you would
think that if they were real about that. He named

(41:18):
Alice Johnson. Partins are Tamika Sam Topeka Sam is working
with them. But I guess they really don't like groups
that focus on mass incarceration.

Speaker 19 (41:31):
Yeah, they don't like groups that are willing to call
out this administration and called balls and strikes. And we
have since January twentieth been public in our opposition to
this administration's mass deportation agenda and gutting federal funding under
Health and Human Services and other agencies for basic treatment, counseling,

(41:52):
access to programs in communities that actually prevent crime and
break its cycle. So they don't like people who are
willing to call out their political agenda for what it is.

Speaker 1 (42:04):
And mind you, the work that we do is all
evidence driven.

Speaker 19 (42:07):
We are an organization that bases everything we do, the
policies that we advocate for based on research. But this
is an administration that is not looking at evidence. It's
looking solely at politics. And now, when the Department of
Justice funding was cut, we thought that might be the
end of it. But when DOGE came knocking, we did ask,

(42:28):
why do you think you have authority to investigate us?
To ask to assign a team to us, which we
knew was a euphemism for taking us over, and they said, well,
we're actually planning to assign a DOGE team to every
agency and institute that receives congressional monies. And so that
should be alarming. By our count there are about one

(42:49):
hundred thousand nonprofit organizations across the country that receive some
amount of federal funding, and if DOGE plans to go
take all of those over that is a terrible and
scary president for our communities and for what happens for
the services of you and the good work that nonprofits do. Now,

(43:10):
the other part that Doge said to us was when
we asked, well, what does working with an organization look like,
they actually reference the US Institute of Peace. And if
folks are following that story, we know that by working
with them. Literally, what Doge did was go and take
over their building, take over the entire organization, fire all.

Speaker 3 (43:30):
Of their skiff, yes, fire everyone exactly.

Speaker 19 (43:32):
And then literally put in install Doge staff for a
twenty seven year old to be the new executive director
of the US Institute of Peace. So that's what nonprofits
across the country can expect if Doge comes knocking on
your door.

Speaker 4 (43:48):
Yeah, and we know that is utterly insane. So it
is just crazy to see what we are experiencing. And
they want to tear down on propit, they want to
tear down in Geo's, they want to go after everyone.
They literally want to completely eradicate I keep saying for

(44:09):
African Americas. They want to completely destroy the economic and
the civil rights infrastructure. They want to completely incapacitate these
groups and spend the next four years making their lives
extremely difficult in order to.

Speaker 3 (44:24):
Drive their agenda. Pure and simple it is.

Speaker 19 (44:27):
It's as simple as that it really is, and we
have been really public about this. We had the Washington
Post break a story the night that we spoke to
Doges earlier this week, because we think sunlight is a
really important disinfectant. Because I agree with you, Roland. All
this administration wants to do is advance their agenda, and

(44:47):
they don't care about who they harm, the very real
impact that it will have on families and communities, and
so we need to call this out because by calling
it out, hopefully we can stop it here as opposed
to encroaching on other organizations. Maybe other organizations aren't able
to call it out and push back in the way
that we are. We decided, yes, losing five million dollars

(45:11):
of federal funding is a big hit, but it would
be a much bigger hit if they come after other
organizations where their entire funding is federal funding and they're
doing important work, and maybe they can't push back in
the way that we can. So we're hoping sunlight is
the biggest disinfectant it and that being loud and asking
for solidarity will help to stop this in as tracks.

Speaker 4 (45:33):
They also can't cut deals with these thugs because they're
going to keep going.

Speaker 1 (45:37):
That's right.

Speaker 5 (45:38):
We have seen that.

Speaker 19 (45:38):
You know one thing I say to the point of
dismantling nonprofit organizations. This is an administration that has systematically
kneecapped the media, law firms, academic institutions. They're coming for
the foundations of civil society, which are these NGOs.

Speaker 3 (45:56):
They're coming for us next, and they and Jeri serppreciate it.
Thanks you, lo I, you up the fight, Thank you,
thanks for having me. Folks, we come back.

Speaker 4 (46:04):
Democratic Maryland Centator Christopher the Holland.

Speaker 3 (46:06):
Returns from L.

Speaker 4 (46:07):
Salvador will show you what he had to say and
also how the president of L. Savage will try to
set them up by saying that, oh, they were just
enjoying Margarita's by the pool.

Speaker 3 (46:18):
Folks.

Speaker 4 (46:18):
If you want to support Roland Martin Unfiltered the Blackstart Network,
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(46:39):
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Speaker 3 (47:10):
We'll be right back.

Speaker 20 (47:15):
This week on the other side of Chain Black Maternal
Health Week.

Speaker 21 (47:19):
The racial disparities are undeniable, making it clear that black
people experience racism from the room America and America's healthcare
system has not taken the time to invest in what
quality healthcare looks like for black person people.

Speaker 22 (47:32):
Data of black maternal health and the United States is
still dismal.

Speaker 23 (47:37):
It is environmental racism, it is systemic racism. It is
the systems that we are born into.

Speaker 20 (47:43):
Only on the other side of change. On the Blackstar Network, I'm.

Speaker 16 (47:50):
Russell ol Honoree Lieutenant Gerald United States Sorrow retired and
you're watching rolland Martin Unfiltered.

Speaker 4 (48:00):
Democratic Maryland Senator Christopher Hollands has he has met with
kil Armando Abrego Garcia, the man mistakenly deported there to
a high security prison for terrorists. Back to the US
man Howland posted this on the social media. He talked
about what his main goal is. He also when he
landed in the United States, he also spoke about what

(48:22):
took place in debunking a lot of the lives that
have actually been spread as well.

Speaker 3 (48:29):
This is the tweet you see it right there. What
he had to say.

Speaker 4 (48:33):
This is him speaking about so called Margarita Gate, talking about.

Speaker 3 (48:41):
Talking about you know what was being brought.

Speaker 4 (48:43):
Up in how frankly they were being set up by
the El Salvador president.

Speaker 3 (48:49):
So check this out. Let me play this for you.
Here we go.

Speaker 24 (48:53):
Sure, now, I just want to take a moment I
hadn't planned to do this, but as I was landing
on the airplane, I got a transcript of some questions.
President Trump was asked at the White House today about
what I would call Margarita Gate. I don't know if
you guys have been following this, but President Bukale, you know,

(49:18):
after I met with Kilmar, did this tweet showing us
at a table with these two glasses.

Speaker 3 (49:27):
So here's what happened. When I first sat down.

Speaker 24 (49:31):
With kill Mark, we just had glasses of water on
the table, I think maybe some coffee. And as we
were talking, one of the government people came over and
deposited two other glasses on the table with ice and
I don't know if it was salt or sugar around

(49:52):
the top, but they look like Margarita's. And if you
look at the one they put in front of Kilmar,
it actually had a little less liquid in the one
in me in front of me to try to make
it look I assume like he drank out of me.
Let me just be very clear. Neither of us touched
the drinks that were in front of us. And if

(50:14):
you want to play a little Sherlock Holmes, I'll tell
you how you can know that. So if you look
at the video or the picture I sent out from
the beginning of our meeting, you'll see there're no glasses
on the table. So you'll see in later videos they are.

Speaker 3 (50:29):
On the table. But they made a little mistake.

Speaker 24 (50:32):
For some people are very careful. Right, if you sip
out of one of those glasses, some of whatever it was,
salt or sugar would disappear.

Speaker 3 (50:40):
You would see a gap. There's no gap.

Speaker 24 (50:43):
Nobody drank any Margarita's or sugar water or whatever it is.
But this is a lesson into the lengths that President
Boukayley will do to deceive people about what's going on.
And it's also shows the lengths that the Trump and
imistration of the President will go to because when he
was asking about a reporter about this, he just went

(51:05):
along for the ride.

Speaker 4 (51:07):
The bottom line is we have a thug sending in
the Oval office and these people have no respect at
all of the law. One of the things that we
are seeing play out here, Matt is, as we said earlier,
they want to position this as, oh, here are Democrats
defending an MS thirteen game member wife beater, how dare you?

(51:30):
Because they want to ignore that the law matters and
if there's somebody, if there's somebody black, because we already
know this the case, who's going I don't care. We
know about black people who are American citizens who have
not gotten due process. Due process means prosecutors don't withhold evidence.

(51:56):
Due process means you don't strike people from juries because
they're black. Due process means you don't fake evidence. And
every example I just use, we've had numerous black people
who have been the victims of a failure of due
process in this country.

Speaker 7 (52:17):
That's spot on.

Speaker 17 (52:18):
But you know what's really interesting, something you alluded to
is what we have not had, at least historically, is
we have not had the highest law enforcement agency in
the country being patently dishonest in front of federal judges
and the way they are now. And you're talking about
due process, what people may know is in the federal
and in the state system, there's a law called Brady,

(52:39):
or there's a former case called Brady, and basically that
requires that a prosecutor has to give any evidence that
may be exculpatory or mitigating to a criminal defendant, right,
and most states have a corollary law. The reason that's
important is now I think DOJ is going to have
to give brady on itself because you have DOJ prosecutors
standing in front of a judge either lying or obfuscating

(53:02):
or otherwise, you.

Speaker 7 (53:03):
Know, withholding evidence.

Speaker 17 (53:04):
And that's something that you here accused of people accusing,
you know, prosecutors of often in criminal cases.

Speaker 7 (53:11):
But it's now something that we have demonstrative.

Speaker 17 (53:13):
Evidence on that DOJ lawyers are doing and are being
fired for the instances where they're being honest. So due
process for black people, for non white people has long
been an issue in this country, but we have never,
in my understanding, historically, ever had circumstances where DJ is
patently being dishonest.

Speaker 1 (53:32):
You know, it's interesting.

Speaker 17 (53:33):
I wasn't born, you know, in nineteen seventy eight. I
wasn't alive, But when I saw that Van Holland was
going down to El Salvador, I frankly thought about Congressman Leo.

Speaker 3 (53:42):
Ryantep because Bukele.

Speaker 17 (53:45):
One of the things that I think has been lost
in the media narrative about everything going on with Gilmar
Garcia and all the people being deported is the fact
that Bukell is an authoritarian. He's an autocrat as much
as an autocrat exists. He thrives on the oppportunity to
be autocratic on the national and on the global scale.
So him and Trump are two peas in a pod

(54:06):
in this respect, and it's doubly problematic that it's El
Salvador in particular, because he revels in the opportunity to
be an authoritarian right and to have this megaprison and
to enjoy I mean, think about the tweet that he
sent out when the plane was in the air and
you just said, oops, I mean, how ominous is it
that he's sending a tweet that way. So I'm glad

(54:29):
that there's proof of life of mister Garcia, but I
am not in any way surprise that they're being dishonest
about the truth of what happened with the whole Margarita gate,
and that we're seeing on the larger scale Bugle engaging
in exactly the kind of dishonesty and autocratic policy that
Trump is.

Speaker 4 (54:46):
When you are dealing with thugs, you have to respond accordingly, Candice.
And this is not a situation where while let's give
him benefit of the doubt, No, you cannot. These are thugs.
These are people who do not care about the law.
What they care about is whatever they consider the law

(55:07):
to be.

Speaker 13 (55:09):
And you know what, I think what's most interesting is
that we have known this, it's just now that we're
seeing it so much more blatantly. I think it kind
of pacifies people to have that expectation, which leads people
to kind of lean back.

Speaker 10 (55:21):
A little more.

Speaker 5 (55:22):
Remember when years ago, when Trump would do something, it
would be ridiculous and out of this world. You couldn't
believe it. He couldn't even won the presidency.

Speaker 13 (55:29):
And now people are kind of like, you know, very
even kill about responses because he's trained everybody to be
that way.

Speaker 5 (55:37):
He's trained everybody to read media in a.

Speaker 13 (55:40):
Way that is just like they edited when you pulled
up that New York Times article, or train people to
have a serious press conference about somebody's freedom internationally who
didn't have any due process.

Speaker 5 (55:54):
But we're talking about margaritas. That is the part of
their plan. So we really have to be really critically discerning.

Speaker 13 (56:02):
About what we are looking at in the media, or
else we're all just going to be confused and kind
of trumping out each other with mis and disinformation. But
that's exactly where they want us to be. So this
is really a good time to think about people like
you are the outlets that are giving information that is real,

(56:22):
and as ourselves being good consumers so that when we
look at stories like this, we can actually see the
lies and not just say, oh, yeah, that's expected. I
think that's one of the travesties of this whole thing,
this long press conference and how much he's spent talking
about Margueritaville.

Speaker 4 (56:40):
What we have to recognize, Michael, if there is a
clear impact here, and I want people watching and listening
to recognize if this is not inside baseball, this is
not all minutes. So that doesn't impact me. When you
heard Inta talk about a severe institute, how that nonprofit
is being impacted. Services, real services are going to be neglected.

(57:04):
People are not going to be able to truly access
a variety of things in this government, the massive cuts
they have made, we are already seeing what the impact
is going to be and so we must be vigilant
about this. And again, black institution must be constantly on
guard because listen, we're on the chopping block. If it's black,

(57:28):
they're going to slap everything under.

Speaker 18 (57:30):
DEI absolutely, and they're doing that everything from removing Harriet
Tubman from the National Park Service website and dealing and
talking about the underground railroad. Yes, they're restored it, but
we keep seeing these stories of African American history, the
black erasure of African American history from government websites, and

(57:50):
then certain information is partly restored or what have you.

Speaker 3 (57:56):
We see the attack.

Speaker 18 (57:57):
We see the closing down of the Minority Business Development
Agency because of an executive order from Donald Trump, and
we know that has helped African American own businesses get
federal contracts. We see the lawsuit there was a lawsuit
in February that the National Urban League entered into against

(58:21):
the Trump administration because of the attacks on DEI. We
just see the NAACP has launched a lawsuit as well
against the Department of Education and their attacks on DEI.
So we see these attacks all across the board. And
then also, as you've been talking about here, the shedding

(58:43):
of tens of thousands of government jobs. If we just
look at the US Postal Service, US Postal Service employees
about six hundred and forty thousand people, twenty nine percent
of them African American. Okay, So when we look at
these attacks on the federal government. However, when we look
at these attacks on federal jobs, when we look at

(59:04):
these attacks on various programs, how whatever excuse they use
to attack, especially African Americans, they're doing it, whether they
say they're fighting anti Semitism, whether they say they're fighting
against diversity, equity and inclusion, whether they say, oh, there's
there's too many people employed in this government agency.

Speaker 3 (59:22):
We see these constant attacks.

Speaker 18 (59:24):
So we have to we have to educate ourselves on
what's happening and fight back as well.

Speaker 3 (59:29):
Oh absolutely, folks, quick break, we come back.

Speaker 4 (59:32):
What happens if a racist acts a fool, you videotape it,
then the bigot turns around ensues you. Yeah, it actually happened.
We'll tell you about that next. Try to hear on
the Blackstar Network.

Speaker 1 (59:46):
This week on a Balanced Life with Doctor Jackie.

Speaker 7 (59:48):
Here on Blackstar.

Speaker 1 (59:49):
Network, we are talking about all things.

Speaker 7 (59:51):
You got it.

Speaker 25 (59:52):
Stress related, yes, the big s, whether it's spiritual, physical, emotional,
or sometimes it could be just in your he Stress
has a way of manifesting its ls in our lives
in such a way that it disrupts.

Speaker 1 (01:00:06):
Who we are and who we're in the process of becoming.

Speaker 5 (01:00:09):
Stress is just as bad as a lot of the
physical elements that we think of.

Speaker 1 (01:00:14):
That's all next on a balanced light on the Black
Star Network.

Speaker 7 (01:00:20):
This is Simple Man, and this.

Speaker 26 (01:00:21):
Is David Man, and you're watching roland Mark Unfiltered.

Speaker 4 (01:00:30):
Months after video surface showing Jonathan Spano is the owner
of a restaurant in Pennsylvania going on a racist tirade
during what looked like a road rage incidents repeated usually
N word and saying I'm a rapist.

Speaker 3 (01:00:42):
Okay, well just watch yourself.

Speaker 6 (01:00:45):
And brother, keep video.

Speaker 1 (01:01:00):
You said the N word like on camera. That's gonna
be great for you. That's gonna be great for you.

Speaker 3 (01:01:05):
I know.

Speaker 6 (01:01:07):
John, I said he has a half nigger brother.

Speaker 4 (01:01:18):
That's gonna be great for you.

Speaker 3 (01:01:19):
I know.

Speaker 17 (01:01:21):
John.

Speaker 4 (01:01:24):
So Spatoff is now suing the people who filmed him
and post the video online after the back back lass
she got. He claims he and his wife never threatened
anyone and we're just talking to a family friend outside
their home when all this happened. He says, the video
is released has cost him and his family such emotional
distress led to the restaurant's closure. The restaurant's website is down.

(01:01:48):
The places Marcus to really close. This lawsuit asks for
damages and says the video hurt his business and reputation.
Here's him talking uh at a news.

Speaker 3 (01:01:58):
Conference captured.

Speaker 27 (01:02:01):
A heated family confrontation in which I intentionally use the
most ugly language known to me to lash out in anger.
I repeatedly use the N word to inflict pain on
another person and sarcastically stated that I was a racist.

Speaker 3 (01:02:26):
I was wrong.

Speaker 27 (01:02:29):
From not walking away from that volatile situation. I was
wrong for responding in anger with hateful language.

Speaker 11 (01:02:44):
I was wrong.

Speaker 27 (01:02:46):
For using a racist term.

Speaker 3 (01:02:49):
I was wrong. I was wrong. I was wrong. Canas
I do you have a legal claim?

Speaker 13 (01:02:58):
Listen, the number one defense to defamation, which is what
he's suing for, and intentional emotional distress.

Speaker 20 (01:03:05):
I believe the.

Speaker 5 (01:03:06):
Number one defense is the truth. So we have the video,
and that's the truth. Even if he was saying it sarcastically.

Speaker 13 (01:03:13):
The truth is that he said it. The truth is right,
That's the truth. He was on public property. Nobody invaded
his privacy in order.

Speaker 1 (01:03:22):
To get that video.

Speaker 13 (01:03:24):
Nobody did anything that was against the law. They shot
a video that he participated in. He didn't even at
the moment say I you know I don't want it.
He was mad about it, but he continued. He decided
to be sarcastic about it in his own words. But
the First Amendment is out there for a reason. You
are allowed to say things like that. The problem is

(01:03:46):
that there are repercussions, There are consequences that there are
hate laws that are in place, and you cannot do that.
So for him to sue for defamation, it is really
a waste of court filings, proceedings times, and he should
be penalized for that because.

Speaker 5 (01:04:04):
That is ridiculous. If it's the truth, it can't be defamation. Sir.

Speaker 3 (01:04:11):
That's it. That's it, Matt.

Speaker 17 (01:04:16):
You know, I hate having to answer questions after candas.
You're one of my favorite people, which is still.

Speaker 7 (01:04:23):
On percent right.

Speaker 17 (01:04:24):
The only thing I'll add to that is I immediately
thought of what a lot of states have, including Texas,
what's called anti slap laws. So that's when you get
a lawsuit against you for constitutionally protected activity, you have
a strong defense and most of the time, to Kndas's point,
those cases are dismissed. Now that's a little different than defamation,
but ultimately here, what I think you have is exactly
what she said, he's on public property, he's the person

(01:04:46):
is filming exercising their constitutional rights, and then the dissemination
of that. There's nothing illegal about that. So I frankly
do not understand his lawyer strategy at all. This seems
to me like this is filed to try to say
face by saying, you know, we're going to try to
assert some nebulous legal right.

Speaker 7 (01:05:04):
But I don't see a jury of.

Speaker 17 (01:05:05):
Twelve people or six people, however it's constituted there, thinking
that he has a legal claim at all, because not
only is it the truth, I mean, he can't claim
that he was in any way, you know, goaded or
coerced or something into one making the statements, and two
he doesn't have any expectation of privacy and anything that's
happening on a public street. I mean, you use this

(01:05:26):
language and you say these kinds of things that you're
on peril. So his business being shut down and all
of that is his own fault. And I don't see
how a jury would ever think there was a basis
to this legal claim. Thank you for stealing everything.

Speaker 4 (01:05:37):
Can What's also Lara's Bichael, is well, you know this
has brought me undue attention.

Speaker 3 (01:05:44):
I guess, I guess you want to continue it? Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 18 (01:05:47):
So they're always remorseful after they get caught, you know,
they always apologize and oh, you know, God knows my
heart and you know, I'm not that bad of a
rasis and things like this after they get caught, after
it goes viral, so you know. And the other thing
is he said the ND word multiple times, so it

(01:06:08):
sounds like you've had practice with this as well. So
and then did patrons start withdrawing economic support from him,
which they should because you wouldn't want somebody like that
fixing your food out of your sight, would you. And
now all of this comes back on him and he's like,

(01:06:29):
oh my god, no, you know, no, come back, stop it.

Speaker 3 (01:06:34):
So this is now what the legal strategy may be.

Speaker 18 (01:06:39):
Trying to appeal to the Fox News Trump supporter crowd,
trying to get sympathy, trying to get sympathy, trying to
get support, Oh, come on and eat at my restaurant,
things of this nature. So they may be trying to,
you know, appeal to that. So in twenty twenty five,
we need to be selective of well, respect our dollars eating.

Speaker 3 (01:07:02):
Hey spanels I got one for you. Want you show
an open up a restaurant called bigots r us.

Speaker 18 (01:07:08):
Can I just say biscuits, Big Michael riskets.

Speaker 7 (01:07:12):
Michael had the ultimate black perspective on this. You won't
want that man fixing your food. That's exactly what my
Big Michael, thank you.

Speaker 13 (01:07:20):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, I will say this that that is
one thing that could could only be uh maybe a
possibly good thing out of this. It's just like Michael
said that, you get somebody to support him. He goes
on Fox, makes his rounds. You get some nationalists, some
right winger to start a GoFundMe page in order to
help this family.

Speaker 5 (01:07:39):
That all he was doing was expressing his anger. And
he is the first of my Amendment right to do this.

Speaker 13 (01:07:45):
And he will get lots of people. I bet if
there was a go fund me page. But that is
the only reason why I could see that they are
doing that.

Speaker 1 (01:07:52):
I agree with Michael.

Speaker 4 (01:07:54):
All right, then, so Cole Cole first of all black
and missy Okay, what got come to me?

Speaker 3 (01:08:16):
Please? All right, y'all set on our video there.

Speaker 4 (01:08:19):
Justice Rich has been missing for doing North Carolina since
March twenty six. Eleven year old is five feet three
inches tall with black hair and brown eyes. Animal information
about justice, Rich should call the Durham, North Carolina Police
Department at nine nine five six old forty six hundred
nine one nine five six SOD four to six zero zero.

(01:08:40):
Last story I gotta ask you all about that?

Speaker 3 (01:08:42):
Is this here?

Speaker 4 (01:08:43):
Donald Trump has named another head of the IRS. There
was a power struggle with Elon Musk. Elon put his
guy in Scott Bessett. The Trade Secretary's like, no, I'm
over this. So the guy gets kicked out, but his
was crazy. Trump's picked Billy Long had one hundred and
thirty thousand dollars of his debt just paid off by
individuals who do business with the IRS.

Speaker 3 (01:09:07):
Michae I'll start with you.

Speaker 4 (01:09:08):
This is one where democrats you do not allow that
confirmation hearing to even be held.

Speaker 1 (01:09:17):
Yeah, you do.

Speaker 18 (01:09:19):
So the confirmation hearing is in the Senate for those
that don't know, don't know. So you use every Senate
tool that you have, procedural tool to stop the hearing,
but also draw attention to it. Wait a second, where
does this money come from? What type of underhanded tactics
are being used? How is he going to have to
pay somebody back to one hundred and thirty thousand. One

(01:09:41):
hundred and thirty thousand, isn't that how much Michael con
took out on a line of credit to pay off
Stormy Daniels to keep quiet before the twenty sixteen election.

Speaker 3 (01:09:51):
One hundred and thirty thousand dollars. Interesting number.

Speaker 18 (01:09:54):
So you bring up this and weaponize that, utilize social media,
get that out to people. But yeah, stop, stop denomination.

Speaker 4 (01:10:04):
What's crazy to hear, Candace is this is the New
Jersey dot com storre Billy Long, a former JP lawmaker
and Trump's nominee for IRS Commissioner, said he paid himself
back using campaign donations for a one hundred and thirty
thousand dollars loan he made to his fail twenty twenty
two Senate campaign. The Lever was the first to report
on the filings, enough that, since Long loss his bid

(01:10:26):
for the Senate, the campaign committee raised less than thirty
six thousan or. However, the campaign committee suddenly took in
nearly one hundred and thirty seven thousands since Trump announced
Long as his IRIS pick. Wow, it's just amazing how
this money just mysteriously shows up.

Speaker 13 (01:10:48):
Now we're good, right, right, Listen, I have hope in
this process, but I also know what we've seen.

Speaker 5 (01:10:58):
Will he be wasting taxpayers money in terms.

Speaker 13 (01:11:00):
Of going through the process going through some type of
confirmation hearing.

Speaker 5 (01:11:04):
He will, But we also know that we've talked.

Speaker 13 (01:11:07):
To people about their alcoholism and they're cheating and all
different types of things on the Senate floor during this
cycle that we thought would not pass muster and certainly
did so.

Speaker 5 (01:11:18):
I think the verdict is out on this. Yeah, we
know it's a waste, but Lord knows what the outcome
will be. Because these iss you just can't predict anything.

Speaker 13 (01:11:27):
We just have such a bad precedent across the board
in all branches of the government.

Speaker 1 (01:11:35):
You just don't know. I mean, this one is really
hard to call.

Speaker 5 (01:11:38):
But he's going to sit in front of them.

Speaker 13 (01:11:39):
I don't think that that's going to stop, and everything
possibly could work out in his favor.

Speaker 3 (01:11:45):
That's I don't think it's hard, Matt, because it's very simple.

Speaker 4 (01:11:50):
If the Democrats don't show up for committee hearing, you
can't hold a committee hearing.

Speaker 3 (01:11:54):
And my whole deal is you say when you show
it up. Yeah, I like it.

Speaker 17 (01:11:59):
I mean, I think Michael right, and I think you're right,
use every every possible tool to prevent this.

Speaker 7 (01:12:04):
But here's the problem.

Speaker 17 (01:12:05):
The problem is you don't have a DOJ that's going
to prosecute the inevitable hookups that he's.

Speaker 7 (01:12:10):
Going to do as the IRS Commissioner if he's confirmed.

Speaker 3 (01:12:12):
Yeah, I mean, this is not a real dejet.

Speaker 4 (01:12:16):
Let's just be let's be real clearly, this is truly
a department of junk.

Speaker 17 (01:12:22):
The normal fail safe would be, you know, a fear
that if you're just openly being bribed that you're going
to end up like Menindez, right, But that's not going
to happen because you have a DOJ that is not
going to prosecute. So, I mean, if you're a criminal,
what's the reason for not hooking this man up and
filling his coffers up so when he's the IRS Commissioner
you get that payback favor. We know that's what's going

(01:12:43):
to happen. So the Democrats should try to stop the confirmation.
But once he's confirmed, what you're going to see is
the same kind of graft for seeing across the rest
of the agencies.

Speaker 3 (01:12:52):
Thugs, thugs, thugs.

Speaker 4 (01:12:54):
And keep in mind, one of things Donald Trump did
he got rid of the logger will of that the
companies could not bribe foreign officials. She's like, nine, We're good,
y'all can go back to that. I'm telling you, this
is just this is a If this was an actual
prosecution case, they would try the Trump administration on reco charges.

(01:13:16):
This is a criminal enterprise. That's what they are, a
criminal enterprise. I've been r Kelly sitting in prison going, damn,
I wish I had given us some money because I
would get pardoned by these people.

Speaker 3 (01:13:31):
Jesse James on steroids. That's what they are.

Speaker 4 (01:13:34):
They are a criminal enterprise. They are an absolute They're
not just grifters. They are thugs. That's what they are,
pure and simple. All right, Matt, Candace, Michael appreciated.

Speaker 3 (01:13:46):
Candace.

Speaker 4 (01:13:47):
Good to see it's been a while since you've been
on the show. So glad to have you back, folks.
Thank you so very much. I appreciated it.

Speaker 3 (01:13:55):
Folks. We're gonna go to a break. We come back.

Speaker 4 (01:13:57):
We're going to hear from an author, Gene Theo Harris,
an amazing book. Every time we talk about doctor King,
it's always the South, it's always Birmingham, it's Selma. Uh,
it's Georgia, it's Atlanta. It's what happened in the South.
But the reality is Doctor King from the beginning was
also focused about the racism that was happening in the North.

(01:14:21):
She details this in a fascinating book. It's a conversation
you are going to enjoy. Don't forget what the work
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(01:15:01):
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Speaker 4 (01:15:36):
When we come back my interview my Rolling Rolands book
Club interview with Gene Theoharris on King of the North.

Speaker 3 (01:15:44):
You're watching the Black Student Network.

Speaker 20 (01:15:48):
This week on the other side of chain Black Maternal
Health Week.

Speaker 21 (01:15:52):
people experience racism from the room America and America's healthcare
system has not taking the time to invest in what
quality help him looks like for black fling people.

Speaker 22 (01:16:04):
A state of black maternal health and the United States
is still dismal.

Speaker 23 (01:16:10):
It is environmental racism, it is systemic racism.

Speaker 7 (01:16:14):
It is the systems that we.

Speaker 5 (01:16:15):
Are born into only on the other side of change
on the Blackstar Network.

Speaker 26 (01:16:22):
Now that Roland Martin is ruling to give me the
blueprint past our rise, I need to go to Tyler
Perry and get another blueprint because I need some green money.
The only way I can do what I'm doing.

Speaker 3 (01:16:33):
I need to make your money. So you'll see me
working with Roland.

Speaker 26 (01:16:36):
Matter of fact, it's the Roland Martin as Sharlander a show.
Well it should it be to show my full show
at Roland show. Well, whatever show is gonna be, it's
gonna be good.

Speaker 3 (01:16:57):
All right. Before I got talking about the book, I
gotta ask Jean, are you kin to leave Steel Harris?

Speaker 1 (01:17:04):
Yeah, you know that. She's my younger sister. We've talked
about this absolutely, God.

Speaker 3 (01:17:11):
Live, Jean. You gotta go with the bit. You gotta
go with it.

Speaker 1 (01:17:13):
Okay, I'll go with the bit I am.

Speaker 4 (01:17:17):
I don't know, of course, Reverend Liz Steel Harris Repairs
of the Breach, partner partner in crime with Bishop William Barber.

Speaker 3 (01:17:26):
Go ahead, there you.

Speaker 11 (01:17:27):
Go, so force of nature herself, right, yep, absolutely absolutely.

Speaker 1 (01:17:32):
It is as lots of people call her, Reverend Liz.

Speaker 3 (01:17:36):
Let's get let's get into this here.

Speaker 4 (01:17:40):
You it's called King of the North, Martin Luther King
Junior's life of struggle outside the South. A lot of
people really don't understand nineteen sixty six.

Speaker 3 (01:17:53):
They don't understand really the depths of the hate the
doctor King experience.

Speaker 4 (01:18:01):
And he said when he was there in the Chicago
symbol of Cicero that he never experienced that level of
hate anywhere in the South. Why did you want to
explore this aspect of river doctor Martinouther King Junior's life.

Speaker 11 (01:18:18):
Well, I mean, I think to begin with, I think
many of us are used to if we think about
doctor King outside the South at all, Right, it is
in those last two years, and when you actually look
more closely, both at his life and his work, the
southernization of doctor King is really kind of limited and inaccurate.

(01:18:41):
Doctor King comes of age in the North at both
Krozer Seminary and Boston University. He experiences both segregation and
the limits of Northern liberalism as a young person in
graduate school. So there is never a time in doctor
King's work, beginning in Montgomery, where he's not calling out

(01:19:04):
the racism and systematic segregation of the North.

Speaker 1 (01:19:09):
And when I use the word North.

Speaker 11 (01:19:10):
I'm using it in the sense that doctor King uses it,
which is Doctor King and many activists at the time
use the word north to talk about everything from the
northeast to the midwest to the west coast that in
many ways define themselves as not being the South in
terms of race relations. They were not the South. They

(01:19:32):
were open, they were free, they were the Promise Land.

Speaker 4 (01:19:36):
Is the way that they would say that, they would say,
oh no, no, no, no, no, no, we're not them exactly.

Speaker 3 (01:19:41):
We are not them, We're not like.

Speaker 1 (01:19:43):
Them, absolutely.

Speaker 11 (01:19:46):
And so one of the things to understand, and I
think we have not understood, is that from the very
beginning of his leadership, he is calling on Northerners, on
northern liberals, both to be outraged about what's happen happening
in the South, but equally to be outraged about what's happening.

Speaker 1 (01:20:04):
In their very own cities, And that as we start
to see.

Speaker 11 (01:20:08):
Some northern outrage about what's happening in the South, he
is saying, okay, but you need to be equally outraged
when someone can't get a job at your where you work,
or can't buy a house where you live. So I
think one of the things that I think we need
to see is that doctor King from the very beginning,
understood that segregation was not a regional sickness, but a

(01:20:31):
national cancer. And he also understood that even some of
the people, some of the white Northerners who began to
get more concerned about what was happening in the South,
and we can think about earlier in American history at
patterns like this, but who assiduously refused to confront segregation

(01:20:54):
where they lived. And so the story of King of
the North Right starts much four right, those moments in
nineteen sixty six in Chicago that you're referring to, and
it is a story of again doctor King calling on
people who considered themselves allies of the civil rights movement

(01:21:15):
to walk the walk where they lived, really challenging this
northern gaslighting that said, oh, the problem is in the South.
We might have some racism here, but it's not systematic
like the South. He's really calling that out, saying it
is systematic. So it's a very different view of doctor
King and about what the expanse both of his work was,

(01:21:36):
but also the expanse of the black freedom struggle.

Speaker 3 (01:21:40):
I like how you start with the preface.

Speaker 4 (01:21:46):
Where you lay out this speech and who he's talking
about and the issues he's talking about, and you wait
for paragraphs before you reveal the city that he is
speaking about. Because what the people even today, when when
they talk about these things, they talk about the freedom,

(01:22:10):
They talk about how things were so different in the West,
how they were different, how there were greater opportunities also
when blacks left the South and moved up north, and.

Speaker 3 (01:22:20):
Those things are true.

Speaker 4 (01:22:22):
You didn't you didn't have a segregated water fountains, you
didn't have segregated buses, things along those lines, but you still.

Speaker 3 (01:22:31):
Dealt with the reality of Jim Crow.

Speaker 4 (01:22:34):
Uh And what really was was really interesting when when
you talk about this, the statewide referendum that dealt with
the issue of allowing the citizens to sell a rented
property to as you said, whoever they wished.

Speaker 3 (01:22:48):
This point that you're.

Speaker 4 (01:22:49):
Making here, that's what got Ronald Reagan elected. This is
and so then when you start thinking about the attacks
on the black panthers as well, caring the rifles and Sacramento.
Uh so this all these people they loved talking about
liberal California, Yes, liberal, and it's like no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
nor California, California exactly white was white, so they operated.

(01:23:15):
They might have been nicer, as you say, only the
language was polite, and people keep getting confused by that.
And even Key when he went to LA with the
riots five years later, was even shocked with the level
of poverty and racism there because he thought it also.

Speaker 3 (01:23:36):
Was a lot different.

Speaker 11 (01:23:38):
Well, I would be careful there, right, I mean, I
think part of what we see Doctor when we see
doctor King over and over in LA in the years
before the Wats Uprising, right, talking about and joining a
movement around police brutality in the city, calling for Chief

(01:23:58):
William Parker, the head of the LA to be replaced,
marching around school segregation in LA, marching and sort of
campaigning against Proposition fourteen in nineteen sixty four, which is
trying to retain the right of Californians to discriminate in
the sale and.

Speaker 1 (01:24:16):
Mental of their property.

Speaker 11 (01:24:18):
We see King is actually in LA more than fifteen
times before the Watts Uprising. So one of the things
that he will say about the Watts Uprising is he
will question.

Speaker 1 (01:24:29):
This sort of shock, this surprise.

Speaker 11 (01:24:32):
He will say, in fact, if they had listened, if
they had acted, this never would have happened, right, He
will tell actually Mayor Daily, if Mayor Yorty, who is
the mayor in LA had listened, this wouldn't have happened.
So in many ways, part of what King's shock about

(01:24:55):
Watts is is the level of willful blindness, if you
will right, the level of California as being.

Speaker 3 (01:25:04):
Like, what is this?

Speaker 11 (01:25:06):
Why are black people so angry? This is a state
without discrimination, And doctor King is like, no, he is
very clear that people have been organizing. He has joined
with them, and over and over public officials, California, residents,
and the media have ignored gas lit or distorted those

(01:25:29):
issues to make it seem like there's not a real problem,
when people were clear for years that there was.

Speaker 4 (01:25:36):
I've always said that the problem in this country, whether
we're talking about then or now, is that if it
is not covert, then there's the belief that it's not overt,
that if we don't see it, if it's not a

(01:25:57):
cross burning, if it's not a church burning, if it's
not a lynching. Oh no, no, no, things are good
as opposed to no. What he laid out here and
what you're laying out and what he was fighting. This
is literally the opinion of systemic racism. And we're operating
in a day where you have Republican Party and even

(01:26:20):
some Democrats who do not believe in systemic racism, who
want to make excuses for what is happening, and they'll oh,
that's it's class and some other stuff, but they want
to deny this reality.

Speaker 11 (01:26:37):
Absolutely, and I mean so part of what doctor King
is saying, and again from the nineteen fifties onward, is
he's calling out a.

Speaker 1 (01:26:48):
Northern liberalism that he calls.

Speaker 11 (01:26:52):
Is you know, he's calling out both sides ism, and
he says it's a kind of quasi liberalism that is
so committed to looking at all sides that it's committed
to none. Right.

Speaker 1 (01:27:01):
That is a criticism that feels so relevant today.

Speaker 11 (01:27:05):
Second, he is talking about a whole range of systemic racism,
some of which is economic violence and some of which
is physical violence. Because I think one of the other
things when you start to look outside of the South
is the ways that even physical violence by white people
against black people moving into neighborhoods, against black people desegregating

(01:27:29):
is also treated differently, and particularly treated differently in this
era by the media. So I would bet most people
listening to this show have heard of Emmettil Right, Emmett Till,
the Chicago boy who goes to Mississippi to visit his
uncle during the summer and is lynched for saying something

(01:27:52):
to a white woman grocery store owner. How many of
us have ever heard of Jerome Hughey. Jerome Huey was
a seventeen year old Chicago teenager who went for a

(01:28:13):
job interview in the neighborhood of Cicero in Chicago in
May of nineteen sixty six. His family also owned a
grocery store, but their grocery store was having trouble, so
he goes to interview at a freight loading company. Now, Cicero,
like many neighborhoods in Chicago, was a sundown neighborhood or

(01:28:34):
a sundown town. And what that means is that black
people could work in those neighborhoods, but they were not
welcome after dark, They were not welcome to live there,
they were not welcome to be there, and so on.
That evening in May of nineteen sixty six, eleven years
after the lynching of emm At Till, he is waiting

(01:28:56):
at a bus stop after his interview, and he is
beaten to basically by four young white men, and he
will die in the hospital.

Speaker 1 (01:29:06):
Two days later. Why don't we know his name?

Speaker 3 (01:29:11):
Right?

Speaker 1 (01:29:12):
This is an act of This is a lynching.

Speaker 11 (01:29:17):
That happens eleven years after Emma til in nineteen sixty six,
after the Civil Rights Actions passed, after the Voting Rights
Actors passed, and a young man is killed because he
is in the wrong neighborhood. But again, I bet very
few of us know the name Jerom Hughey because again,

(01:29:37):
even racial violence is treated differently in the North than
it is in the South.

Speaker 4 (01:29:42):
So speaking of that particular point, I think about there
were three deaths that happened in the span of a
couple of months. So we often so we know what
ferguson Michael Brown, how that thing just just blew up,
and it was really that reaction to it.

Speaker 3 (01:30:01):
But before that, Eric Garner took place in New York City.

Speaker 4 (01:30:05):
But also what was sandwich in between those two was
John Crawford. The third that took place in Ohio. And
I think what happens is, and we see this all
the time in media. What happens is is which one
gets the attention a lot of people.

Speaker 3 (01:30:24):
John. We were at a rally.

Speaker 4 (01:30:25):
It was the actually the twentieth diversity of the meevand March,
and they had a number of the families who were impacted,
who lost children, And multiple times John Crawford's father will
come up to me and he would say, thank you
for continuing to mention my son's name, because oftentime it

(01:30:48):
doesn't get mentioned. And I remember that there were a
group of women who were on the front row and
they were upset because there were another group that spoke
from the podium that day and it was the prominent
names that we know that became national stories.

Speaker 3 (01:31:09):
And these women were angry, up set, and they.

Speaker 4 (01:31:12):
Said, our sons died too, our daughters died too.

Speaker 3 (01:31:17):
Why are we not up on that stage?

Speaker 4 (01:31:20):
And unfortunately how media operates, media picks and chooses which
story gets elevated and becomes.

Speaker 3 (01:31:29):
A national story.

Speaker 20 (01:31:47):
This week, on the other side of Change, Black Internal Healthyek.

Speaker 21 (01:31:51):
people experience racism from the room America, and America's healthcare
system has not taken the time to invest in what
quality healthcare looks like for black.

Speaker 22 (01:32:03):
The data of black maternal health and the United States
is still dismal.

Speaker 23 (01:32:09):
It is environmental racism, It is system of racism. It
is the systems that we are born into.

Speaker 5 (01:32:15):
Only on the other side of change on the Blackstar Network.

Speaker 4 (01:32:34):
To your particular point of how the priving point of
how media determines if it's big news, it then becomes elevated.

Speaker 11 (01:32:46):
Well, and I think, I mean, I think this media
point is a crucial one because I think one of
the things, one of the myths that we have about
the civil rights movement stems from the media's role in
parts of the Southern struggle. So what we see increasingly
by the late fifties and early sixties is the national

(01:33:07):
media taking Southern racism and the Southern movement seriously.

Speaker 1 (01:33:14):
They are doing rigorous reporting. They are not taking what
Southern officials say at face value. They're questioning it.

Speaker 11 (01:33:23):
Reporters are going and spending significant time, and what you
see is some significant coverage. And so if we're thinking
about the Southern struggle, and we can think about Congressman
John Lewis saying we would have.

Speaker 1 (01:33:36):
Been a bird without a song without those reporters.

Speaker 11 (01:33:41):
Okay, at the very same time that this is happening.
These same news outlets are covering the movement in New York,
in Boston, in Chicago, in La very different. One of
the things we know about this period, and we can

(01:34:02):
extrapolate today, is that when you look at Southern media,
like if you look at the Montgomery Advertiser around the
Montgomery bus boycott, the Montgomery Advertiser hates the Montgomery bus boycott,
thinks it's un American, thinks it's disruptive things, it's horrible.
But these are the very same kinds of frames that
we will see newspapers like the New York Times use

(01:34:28):
around the New York City school boycott in February of
nineteen sixty four, which is the largest civil rights protest
of the era.

Speaker 1 (01:34:37):
It's almost twice as big as the March on Washington.

Speaker 11 (01:34:41):
But how the New York Times covers it is that
it's violent, unreasonable, reckless, these.

Speaker 1 (01:34:48):
Kinds of frames.

Speaker 11 (01:34:49):
So I think one of the things that's really important,
I think that you're getting us to in terms of
the media is the ways that partly we don't know
this story outside the out because the media at the
time was very invested.

Speaker 1 (01:35:06):
In some ways exposing Southern horrors.

Speaker 11 (01:35:10):
Questioning Southern officials, but taking Northern officials. If they say, oh,
we're not discriminating, they say they're not discriminating.

Speaker 1 (01:35:18):
That's it. Why are black people so angry? This is
so unreasonable? Ten years after Brown that New York black
people are saying.

Speaker 11 (01:35:28):
That they're going to boycott schools because there's no even
plan for desegregation. Right, how that would have looked if
that was in Birmingham to the New York Times looks
very different than it does when it happens in New York.
So I think the role that the media plays in
giving us a narrative about sort of the I mean,

(01:35:49):
I think there's a set of myths that the media helps.

Speaker 1 (01:35:53):
To kind of.

Speaker 11 (01:35:55):
In Trench that are with us today. One that the
media was largely the South, not all across the country.
Two that black Northerners did not organize nonviolent movements. In fact,
some of the most expansive mass movements are happening in

(01:36:17):
cities like Chicago. Three Northern black people couldn't get down
with nonviolence, couldn't get down with doctor King. And this
gets us to I think another point Roland that you're
getting us to, which is the difference between the white
mainstream media and how the black press was covering it,
because if you turn to the black press in this era,

(01:36:40):
you get a very.

Speaker 1 (01:36:41):
Different perspective both on.

Speaker 11 (01:36:45):
The largeness, the robustness, all of the different issues that
sort of movements all across.

Speaker 1 (01:36:51):
The country are taking up.

Speaker 11 (01:36:53):
And then when we turn to the mainstream white press,
we get a much different view.

Speaker 4 (01:37:00):
Well, as you were talking, I could not help but
remember that it was a race riot in Harlem that
propelled Adam Clayton Powell from pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church
to the.

Speaker 3 (01:37:16):
United States Congress.

Speaker 4 (01:37:18):
And when you open talking and again how media covered it.
The media covered this as a race riot as opposed
to police brutality. This you open this talking about King
in La that story police brutality. The reality is when
if you look at virtually all of the race riots
that started, nearly all of them started with the issue

(01:37:42):
of police brutality. Now fast forward to the nineteen nineties,
two thousands, of course, George Floyd and Michael Brown.

Speaker 3 (01:37:51):
And Eric Garner and John Croppo the third and.

Speaker 4 (01:37:55):
I can just keep Kajima Powell, I can just keep
naming names pice brutality, police shootings, police actions. And I
think what you layout is that's because what you talk
in terms of how media covers it is because what
I always try to explain to people, which is not
an indictment of every white person, but the reality is

(01:38:18):
the folks who control mainstream white media, they are largely
white men. In these white men and including white women,
they bring their subjective biases to the table. So therefore,
when they're making editorial decisions, when in television stations, radio stations,
newspaper and now digital, they are seeing the America, seeing

(01:38:42):
the fifty States, seeing the cities, seeing the neighborhoods through
the prism of their whiteness. And so if they don't
even know, I mean, listen the current Commission. They didn't
agree on a lot. What they did agree on is
that they were were to Americas, one white, one black,
and they say the media needed to diversify. The Colonel

(01:39:03):
Commission was talking about DEI diversity, equity inclusion. And so
the fundamental issue that King had to face is that
he was battling a mainstream white media that had rose
colored views of their cities and said this stuff doesn't exist.

Speaker 3 (01:39:21):
What the black folks were like I'm telling y'all this
is real.

Speaker 4 (01:39:24):
And the white folks in the city and the state,
regardless of whether we're talking Cicero, Chicago, Illinois, La, California,
New York City, New York State, whatever, they were just like,
I don't know, why, what are you black folks talking about?

Speaker 3 (01:39:39):
Y'all got it good? What's wrong? We're not sicking dogs
on you? Right?

Speaker 11 (01:39:44):
And then I mean, what King will say right in
the nineteen sixties is, while the while the nation trembled
with outrage about police brutality in the South, police brutality
in the North was tolerated, you know, ignored and justified.

Speaker 3 (01:40:04):
But he also but he also called out black people.

Speaker 4 (01:40:08):
Clarence Jones writes in his book that here he was
a lawyer in Los Angeles, doing very well economically, Edward King,
and he was like, man, I ain't got time to
be involved in this sort of stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:40:19):
I'm getting paid.

Speaker 4 (01:40:20):
And he said he he King gives a speech and
he said it was as if King was bearing into
my was boring into my soul, like he was.

Speaker 3 (01:40:32):
Talking directly to me.

Speaker 4 (01:40:33):
And it was after that speech when Clarence Jones committed
himself to the movement. So King was even talking to
black folks who believed that their lives were so much
better than those southern negroes, right.

Speaker 11 (01:40:49):
And he's also I think there are sort of people
like Clarence Jones, right, who King is kind of challenging
to also step up. And because one of the things
King is noticing, and he will be talking about northern
cities by the mid sixties through a frame of domestic colonialism,

(01:41:11):
and part of what he is critiquing through that metaphor,
he's critiquing the police, the role of the police and
courts as enforcers, that's his word, not mine. He's critiquing
the ways that people are profiting from black and miseration.
And he is also critiquing the way that elevating certain
black people to high places, right is used as a

(01:41:34):
buffer to keep the majority of black people segregated and impoverished.
And in Chicago, he'll call it plantation politics. So I
think one of the things that King is challenging is
kind of the both the systemicness of it, but also
the different tactics that are used, particularly in sort of

(01:41:57):
big cities, like you're saying, LA, New York, Chicago, Boston, right,
So there are there is there are these little what
we might call crevices. There are black congressmen like Adam
Clayton Powell. There are black aldermen like a number of

(01:42:19):
aldermen that will support Richard Daley throughout that whole Chicago
struggle and be really a buffer against and a barrier
to any change in Chicago. So part of what King
is also kind of pushing within kind of the black
community is to kind of see and start to.

Speaker 1 (01:42:42):
Sort of see the ways that.

Speaker 11 (01:42:47):
This kind of systemic racism like you like you're saying,
is being perpetuated in somewhat different ways.

Speaker 3 (01:42:57):
Right, So the.

Speaker 11 (01:42:58):
Blackfaces and high places, there's all this obsession with the
problem of black crime or the problem of black people.

Speaker 1 (01:43:07):
Right.

Speaker 11 (01:43:07):
Black people just need to clean up their neighborhoods. And
King is very adamant right that, No, the problem is
there's differential sanitation services between the West Side ghetto of
Chicago and you know.

Speaker 1 (01:43:21):
The northern suburbs, is.

Speaker 11 (01:43:25):
Right, And so he's telling a very different history not
just of the South, but about the United States in
the twentieth century.

Speaker 1 (01:43:33):
Right, He's talking.

Speaker 11 (01:43:34):
About FHA and you know loans that enable right, these
white neighborhoods and white suburbs and are often denied right
in black neighborhoods and to black people. He's telling a
different narrative about right accessing even things like the gi built.
He's telling a different narrative about the differentials in city services,

(01:43:57):
in access.

Speaker 1 (01:43:58):
To higher education. So he is very clear right that
there's all this obsession with you know, merit.

Speaker 11 (01:44:05):
And bootstraps and black crime, and he's saying, actually, the
problem is white crime, is white illegality in the ghettos.

Speaker 1 (01:44:12):
And he's also saying, we need to tell a different
history of the United States.

Speaker 4 (01:44:18):
As you were talking on that on that particular front,
when we talk about delivery of services, we talk about resources.
It's also the illusion, the illusion that things are better,
the illusion that that things were so much grander.

Speaker 3 (01:44:42):
You had blacks who fled the South, who.

Speaker 4 (01:44:44):
Are being threatened with death, who literally left land that
they own, that the families owned because they were being
threatened with death by the KKK and racist whites. Then
travel then travel up north, and now you're living in
packed neighborhoods where you can't buy homes, where you can't
even in some cases you could even resell you have

(01:45:06):
black folks who owned homes, and then if you wanted
to sell the home, you had to get the permission
of the person who you bought it from, which is
just still crazy.

Speaker 3 (01:45:15):
And so then.

Speaker 4 (01:45:17):
Depressed values. Therefore you can't build black wealth. And so
but the illusion was that, hey.

Speaker 3 (01:45:24):
But.

Speaker 4 (01:45:26):
Things are better, and so there's this conflict that is
constantly going on. A few years ago, I was invited
to give a speech at a church. It was Episcopalian
or maybe in a press paterip that can't remember. There
was a fiftieth anniversary of doctor King giving a speech

(01:45:46):
calling for in essence, health care for all.

Speaker 3 (01:45:50):
That speech was in Chicago. It wasn't else, all.

Speaker 11 (01:45:54):
Right, I mean he's taking on I mean one of
the things that he's also zeroing in on, right is
that these conditions, these overcrowded conditions that you're like, you're.

Speaker 1 (01:46:05):
Saying, are not just happening by accident. They are happening
by policy.

Speaker 11 (01:46:10):
They are happening by municipal decision, and they could happen differently.

Speaker 1 (01:46:15):
So one of the things they're doing in the Chicago campaign.

Speaker 11 (01:46:18):
They're organizing rent strikes, they're organizing tenant organizations, they are
basically calling out the fact that chicag go at this
press incredibly kind of some of the most developed kind
of building codes in the country, and yet they're not enforced,
and they're particularly not enforced in the two black ghettos, right,

(01:46:43):
which are the Chicago's South Side and then Chicago's West Side.
And so King is saying this is there is profit
being made from this against segregation and ghettoization. He's also
saying these services are distinctly different.

Speaker 1 (01:46:59):
They are choosing to make these services different.

Speaker 3 (01:47:01):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:47:02):
Schools schools in.

Speaker 11 (01:47:03):
Black neighborhoods, for instance, are so overcrowded that in many
cities you see school officials because they don't want to
rezone black students into white schools, moving black schools to
double session days.

Speaker 3 (01:47:35):
What's up, y'all? Look, fan base is more than a platform.

Speaker 28 (01:47:38):
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for everyday people to invest in black owned tech infrastructure
and help shape the future of social media. Investing in
technology is essential for creating long term growth and influence.

Speaker 3 (01:47:51):
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Speaker 29 (01:47:52):
The black community must not only consume tech, we must
own discover how equity crowdfunding can serve as a power
tool for funding black businesses, allowing entrepreneurs to raise capital
directly through their community through the jobs at.

Speaker 4 (01:48:24):
The ways I keep going back to the media piece
is because it goes back to the story. You saw
the young man who was killed. Mass Media controls a narrative.
Mass media frames the story. So as long as this
race theme is a regional theme, then we don't have.

Speaker 3 (01:48:47):
To really focus on that. And so but then what then.

Speaker 4 (01:48:51):
Happens is, as you were talking, I just kept coming
back to not my backyard.

Speaker 3 (01:48:57):
Oh no, no, no, no, no, doctor King, that's them
down there now, don't bring that stuff up here.

Speaker 4 (01:49:05):
So they love him, Oh, it's great, Oh, we appreciate
what you're doing. What he was essentially doing to white liberals,
to so called white allies, was holding up a mirror
and said this has actually happened in here, and they
were they essentially said, get the hell out of my
face with that.

Speaker 3 (01:49:26):
Absolutely, absolutely, he was being confronted with.

Speaker 11 (01:49:30):
Over and over and over, right with Mayor Wagner in
New York, with Mayor already in la with Mayor Daily.

Speaker 1 (01:49:37):
In Chicago, right, all of these people.

Speaker 11 (01:49:39):
As long as I was safe in the South that's
King's phrase, right, They might want to take pictures with him,
they would say nice things with him, and then the moment,
the very first moment, he would say something like in
nineteen sixty three he called Chicago as segregated as Birmingham.
And guess what Daily calls them an outside agitator. The

(01:50:02):
Chicago Tribune calls him an outside agitator.

Speaker 1 (01:50:05):
Right, This sense of you.

Speaker 11 (01:50:06):
Don't have any business talking about my city, similarly with
la similarly with New York.

Speaker 1 (01:50:13):
The other thing about that media, right, is that.

Speaker 11 (01:50:16):
When we get to then the uprisings, then there is
this convenient amnesia, like you're saying, because if you're not
covering all of these movements that have been saying for years,
hey there's a real problem with police brutality. Hey there's
a real problem with job discrimination. Hey there's a real
problem with the lack of code enforcement. Then part of

(01:50:40):
what you see in that national media is this shock
and surprise.

Speaker 1 (01:50:44):
Why are people so angry? Why is this happening?

Speaker 11 (01:50:48):
As opposed to having to reckon with the fact that
for years people had protested and picketed and gone to
meetings and organized petitions and gotten arrested to say Hey,
there's these problems and you ignored it, right, because we
could imagine how the media could have, for instance, treated

(01:51:10):
the Watts Uprising very differently, which is then to have
gone back to you know, Governor Brown, to Mayoriority, to
you know, various public officials in LA and said, why
didn't you do anything when people raised that issue in
nineteen sixty two, raised that issue in nineteen sixty three,

(01:51:31):
How did you let it get to this? But no,
that's not what the media did. The media was sort
of obsessed with this kind of shock. They were obsessed
with kind of protecting the police. The police are doing
a good job. The LA Times will say, these, you know,
these complaints of police brutality, you know, are largely not

(01:51:52):
you know, they questioned them. And so that media frame
both then has had I think, very devastating consequences for
how we understand that history because in erasing those movements,
most of us didn't learn those movements in school. Most books, right,
most books on the civil rights movement. You know, our

(01:52:16):
public celebration of King Day, right, it tends to be southern.
And so the notion that there were these huge movements
all across the country and that the United States, because
I think I want to say one more thing, right,
because there is a kind of convenience to the Southern narrative,
which is that it is regional, like we're talking about,
but it also is a story that is told as

(01:52:39):
a story of struggle and triumph. Right that we recognized
an injustice and we fixed it. If we look outside
the South, that story gets a lot more complicated and
a lot less happy, Right. And to grapple with the
fact that in this country, right oftentimes, even when you
shine a light on injustice, in justice is not fixed.

(01:53:00):
And I think that is something that people in the
United States really don't want to face.

Speaker 3 (01:53:07):
All that often.

Speaker 4 (01:53:09):
I have to stay on media because it was media
that opened your eyes.

Speaker 3 (01:53:14):
To this black owned media. And why do I say that.
I have said for.

Speaker 4 (01:53:24):
Last twenty years that my greatest fear is that the
death the death of black owned media. It's going to
be the death of black people. And what I mean
by that, I'm being very specific when I say black
owned media, not black targeted media. Black targeted media means

(01:53:45):
black people don't own those properties that we are being
targeted for financial gain. So radio networks, digital websites, other
products television networks. The reality is that you take a
bet they're no longer black owned. H you got a
new show that airs one day a month, that's it,

(01:54:07):
one hour, nothing virtually on digital.

Speaker 3 (01:54:11):
And so what are you being fed? You're being fed
reality shows.

Speaker 4 (01:54:14):
You're being fed comedies, dramas, sitcoms, award shows.

Speaker 1 (01:54:19):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (01:54:20):
And that's what you're constantly being fed.

Speaker 4 (01:54:22):
The reality is it was black owned newspapers that was
covering doctor.

Speaker 3 (01:54:30):
King in all of these cities.

Speaker 4 (01:54:32):
And so the issue I'll never forget watching it was
Meet the Press and Doris Kerns Goodwin was on, and
they were they begin to talk about Emmett Till and
she references the New York Times putting the image of
Immit Till on the cover. And I was watching it,

(01:54:52):
and I immediately with the Twitter, I said, oh, hell no,
you are not going to do this. How dare you
call yourself a historian? Doris Currents Goodwin and not mentioned
that it was Jet Magicy, the Chicago Defender and that
image on that captured the attention of black America, which

(01:55:16):
then caused white media to then begin to focus on it.
And so the story you're talking about the reason I
dare say a lot of folks don't.

Speaker 3 (01:55:27):
Know about this, absolutely because they.

Speaker 4 (01:55:30):
Were not paying attention to the Chicago Defender, the Amsterdam News,
the black newspapers on the West Coast, and the Black
the Banner in Boston.

Speaker 3 (01:55:41):
Uh, they were paying attention and that was it.

Speaker 4 (01:55:44):
And so black owned media was there were highlighting these
stories over and over and over again, and it was
white media not paying attention.

Speaker 3 (01:55:56):
Oh my gosh.

Speaker 1 (01:55:57):
Absolutely.

Speaker 11 (01:55:57):
And in fact, I think part of that myopia about
because I mean, we have a pile of books on
doctor King, and one of the things that I really
grappled with was how is it that this kind of
southernization of King has been maintained? And for me, part
of telling this story is absolutely that it For me,

(01:56:21):
it was about studying the movement in LA and studying
the black media for not a project around doctor King initially, right,
but just looking at the black freedom struggle in LA
before Watts, looking at the La Sentinel in the California Ego,
which were the two big blast newspapers at the time, and.

Speaker 1 (01:56:38):
I kept finding doctor King and that's not the story
we get. The story we.

Speaker 11 (01:56:44):
Get is that King kind of you know, is in
the South, and then their struggle and there's hardship, and
then we get the Civil Rights Act, and then we
get the Voting Rights Act.

Speaker 1 (01:56:55):
And then the next week Watts erupts.

Speaker 11 (01:56:57):
And King is surprised and shocked by Northern and racism,
and then he decides he goes to Watts and then he.

Speaker 1 (01:57:04):
Decides to go to Chicago.

Speaker 11 (01:57:05):
That's basically the story that is, you know, replicated in
so many books, so many documentaries.

Speaker 1 (01:57:12):
Yeah, I think, like you're saying, if you look at
the Black Press, that story does not hold.

Speaker 3 (01:57:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:57:19):
I think when you look at I think it's because
I have the book and I've interviewed him.

Speaker 3 (01:57:23):
I think it's Nicholas. I'm looking up right now. Nicholas
Cots his book on what you just described.

Speaker 4 (01:57:33):
And I have the book and it's called Judgment Days
Lyndon Baines, Johnson, Martin Luther King and the Laws That
Changed America. Fascinating book. But what you just described is
exactly what he writes. He writes that when the riots

(01:57:53):
in Watts breaks out, King travels to Watts, sees the
hears about the housing and the racism, and he writes
that MLK falls into a state of depression, and he writes,

(01:58:13):
he writes that LBJ, this is days after signing the
Civil Rights Bill voting rights, that falls into a state
of depression that these two individuals are so LBJ is shocked,
mad and pissed off that black folks were not just

(01:58:35):
you know, celebrating the signing of this law.

Speaker 3 (01:58:38):
And then MLK is depressed by what he sees.

Speaker 4 (01:58:41):
That literally is what Cox nice man and I really
enjoyed the book, writes in his book.

Speaker 1 (01:58:49):
And it's just I mean it is. I want to
tell you a couple of things. Number one, yes, is
doctor King depressed? Yes, But do you know what that
depression is about.

Speaker 11 (01:58:58):
I think, just like you're saying, if you think about
people who were involved in the movement for Black Lives
right in Ferguson in many years, then we get George Floyd, right,
that sense of trying and lifting up these issues and
lifting up these issues, and here it has happened again.

Speaker 17 (01:59:18):
Right.

Speaker 11 (01:59:19):
So I think part of if you don't start in
the black press, if you don't start talking and listening
to people you know who are being you know, interviewed
in the black press, who are movement activists for instance
in LA right seeing King in those spaces and then

(01:59:40):
seeing the ways the wilful kind of rejection of King
will call Prop fourteen, for instance, a vote for ghettos.
He will call it one of the most shameful tragedies
of the twentieth century. He will say its passage is
part of what lays the groundwork for the Watts uprising
nine months later. But right that all gets erased in

(02:00:05):
that doctor King is depressed and Johnson is so surprised.

Speaker 1 (02:00:09):
The second thing that gets erased is what is actually
what doctor King calls on Johnson to do. Right, They
have a call after Watts and Johnson's.

Speaker 11 (02:00:22):
Wanting all this credit for like the War on Poverty
and thinks the War on Poverty programs are going to
solve everything. And doctor King cuts in and says, no,
we have to deal with this, the kind of racial
policies of people like y Aloradi and Parker. That's the
police chief, right, So police brutality, school segregation, housing segregation,
the war on poverty is not enough if you don't

(02:00:43):
deal with the kind of racial inequality in the city.

Speaker 1 (02:00:47):
And Johnson doesn't want to hear that.

Speaker 30 (02:00:51):
And we begin tonight with the people who are really running.

Speaker 1 (02:01:08):
The country right now.

Speaker 30 (02:01:09):
Trump is often wrong and misleading about a lot of things,
but especially about history.

Speaker 1 (02:01:12):
Wil Trump falling in line with President Elon Musk in.

Speaker 4 (02:01:15):
The way of the unsettling news that MSNBC has canceled
Joy and Reads primetime show. The Readout Roland Martin and
the Blackstar Network would like to extend an invitation to
all of the fans of Joy and Read MSNBC show
to join us every night to watch Roland Martin Unfiltered
streaming on the Blackstar Network for news discussion of the

(02:01:37):
issue that matter to you and the latest updates on
the twice impeached, criminally convicted fellam in Chief Donald Trump
as unprecedented assault on democracy, as well as co President
Elon musk takeover of the federal government.

Speaker 3 (02:01:51):
The Blackstar Network stands.

Speaker 4 (02:01:52):
With Joy and Read and all folks who understand the
power of black voices in media. We must come together
and never forget that information is power. Be sure to
watch Roland Martin Unfiltered weeknights six pm Eastern at YouTube
dot com, forward slash Roland s Martin, or download the
Black Star Network Happen. What's interesting is, as you were

(02:02:29):
describing King talking about these issues.

Speaker 3 (02:02:32):
I reflect back on.

Speaker 4 (02:02:35):
Reading and listing to speeches from Malcolm X, and so
there are different stages of Malcolm X. Malcolm X was
an individual who was constantly evolving, and the reality is
when he's assassinated in nineteen sixty five, is that that
was a Malcolm X who was moving to another evolution

(02:02:56):
of who he was. And in the organization of Asri
American Year, he actually wrote and he was he was
meeting with that he was going to join forces with
pastors and civil rights leaders.

Speaker 11 (02:03:08):
To find out absolutely and in fact, as you know,
he'd been down in Selma a few weeks before he's
assassinated and meets with Carreta and they have this really
lovely meeting and she talks about the like much wanted
right coming together of Malcolm and you know and Martin Right,
and she's devastated. Both Kings are devastated when Malcolm is assassinated.

(02:03:31):
I also think we have drawn even a kind of
too sharp of a difference between them when you start
to look at what doctor King is supporting in the
you know, in places like La. Right goes to la
and talking about the police murder of Ron Stokes in
nineteen sixty two. Right, that's what Malcolm is doing there,
goes to New York talking about and joining with you know,

(02:03:54):
around the New York City School boycott, as is Malcolm
around the protests like against kind of races construction unions,
Doctor King will be working.

Speaker 3 (02:04:03):
We'll call his.

Speaker 11 (02:04:04):
Favorite union, New York eleven ninety nine. That's the only
union that Malcolm X speaks in front of. So I
also think sometimes we miss in many ways the overlaps
of the kinds of movements that both of them are supporting,
particularly as we get into the you know sixty two,
sixty three, sixty four, and then the cutting short of
Malcolm's life.

Speaker 3 (02:04:24):
See the thing that the reason what I what I
find to be very interesting is that.

Speaker 4 (02:04:29):
When Malcolm X was going after highly criticizing these black
preachers and he was attacking them in speeches and on television,
he was literally talking about slum lords in Harlem.

Speaker 1 (02:04:45):
Absolutely, he was.

Speaker 3 (02:04:47):
Literally talking about racism in the North. Absolutely.

Speaker 4 (02:04:52):
A lot of people want to also ignore one of
the major reasons people a lot of people try to
focus on infidelity of Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X's criticism
of that, but a huge part of Malcolm X's disillusionment
with the Nation of Islam was that when the Nation

(02:05:14):
of when Nation of Islam had members who were beaten
and killed by cops, they were always told to stand
down by Logi Muhammad. So Malcolm X is frust So
Malcolm X is frustrated that we're saying one thing, we're
not the cheap We're going to respond, and he's like,

(02:05:34):
we never respond. So these courses, to your point, were
literally talking about the exact same thing.

Speaker 3 (02:05:42):
The difference. The difference was.

Speaker 4 (02:05:46):
Malcolm X did not like that approach of King and
others that he felt was assimilation, being cowards, just trying
to trying to acquiesce and appease the white man. But again,
after Malcolm goes to Mecca, he literally comes back and
realizes that one a white folks, y'all black fols lab

(02:06:11):
because do what we do. But I'm actually in the
I'm actually in the same boat with them, because we're
trying to fight the exact same thing. He was dealing
with racism, systemic racism in the North while he was
sitting here ripping King in the South.

Speaker 3 (02:06:27):
He was kind of like, we're in the same boat.

Speaker 11 (02:06:30):
Well, absolutely, and I think Malcolm is more complicated than
we often see him.

Speaker 3 (02:06:34):
Right.

Speaker 11 (02:06:35):
We can think about message to the grassroots, his critique
of the March on Washington, But where is Malcolm during
the March on Washington. He's in Washington, d C. And
he's made it known if people need him, he is there.

Speaker 3 (02:06:47):
Yeah, probably with Ruby den Ousti.

Speaker 1 (02:06:49):
Davis absolutely right, he is. I mean, like, if we think.

Speaker 11 (02:06:53):
About what are King and Malcolm doing in l A, right,
they're both talking like you're saying, I totally agree, right.
I think there's been all this attention to you know,
Malcolm growing, you know growing, you know, disillusionment with Elijah
Muhammad around the infidelity.

Speaker 1 (02:07:08):
But I think this split really sort of begins.

Speaker 11 (02:07:12):
Much more, or not begins, but gets much more like
Palpable in nineteen sixty two when he's gone to la
because Ron Stokes has been killed a number of other
unarmed members of the nation have been injured, and people
are building a movement and Malcolm is kind of coming
together with that movement and then Elijah Mohammad makes him

(02:07:35):
leave and that happened, you know, and he keeps, you know,
this kind of wanting to walk the walk and not
just like talk about it, but like you're saying, be
able to be organizing, be doing kind of pushing for
the kinds of change and being held back.

Speaker 1 (02:07:54):
So I think there's no way to understand the.

Speaker 11 (02:07:56):
Split as a kind of Malcolm growing disillusionment with not
being able to make that political rhetoric into actual like
movement on the ground.

Speaker 4 (02:08:13):
One of the things that I found it'd be interesting
as you lay out and talk about King's travel to
the point he wasn't traveling just to the south tippy Arizona.
Where were in your research? Obviously we think about large cities,
we think about Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, Boston,

(02:08:34):
But where were some of the out of way places
he was also uh calling out northern racism.

Speaker 1 (02:08:43):
I mean, and I think and I think.

Speaker 11 (02:08:44):
Before we we if we've we know that doctor King
traveled a lot, but I think we've really reduced that
to oh, it's about fundraising.

Speaker 3 (02:08:53):
Right, only we're getting an award or he.

Speaker 1 (02:08:55):
Was hoards right, because he was just talking right. He's
just talking right.

Speaker 11 (02:09:00):
And I think one of the things that I and
again really seeing this through the eyes of the Black Press,
that he is showing up for so many people's struggles right,
So people are saying, we're organizing, So how does he
get involved with eleven ninety nine in New York In
they're going to what's nine, ah, thank you? Eleven ninety

(02:09:21):
nine is the Hospital and Healthcare Workers Union in and
in nineteen fifty nine, they are trying to organize the
lowest baide hospital workers, which are black and Puerto Rican
women working kind of a split shift. They're kind of
like orderlies. They come in in the morning and then
they come in they have to come in again at night.
They're working in. Their wages are so low. Doctor King

(02:09:44):
says that you can't even call them wages. And so
they're organizing a strike and they meet with doctor King,
and doctor King says, count me in, call on me.
And this is one of the things that I think
we also have not understood about his leadership, which is
this that part of what is like in this travel

(02:10:06):
is doctor King showing up and being you know me
as we talk about today, showing up for sort of
people's work, showing up for people's struggles.

Speaker 1 (02:10:18):
Right.

Speaker 11 (02:10:18):
That that's a key facet of his leadership as he
sees it. And so he just travels. The amount of travel,
the amount of exhaustion. Right, to be able to do
that and to really prioritize that, I think we've really
missed that. I think the other thing we miss is
how often, again, like you're saying, we assume he's just

(02:10:40):
he's getting awards, and then when you actually listen to
what he's saying, he's constantly right reminding his audience.

Speaker 1 (02:10:49):
That there is a problem here too.

Speaker 11 (02:10:51):
Right, you've invited me even in some of these where
he's been invited just to talk about the movement in
Birmingham or the movement and in Selma or you know,
he's not stopping there, right, He's also talking about what's
happening right there wherever he is, whether it's Tempe, whether

(02:11:12):
it's in Iowa, whether it's in Cincinnati, whether it's in
you know, Washington, d C. Right, he's out for Washington
d C.

Speaker 1 (02:11:24):
Statehood.

Speaker 11 (02:11:24):
There are so many issues that he is joining and
helping to kind of support local struggles. And I think
we've missed this, this aspect of his leadership. I think
we're so used to seeing sort of him, you know,
kind of at a distance, right, that this way that

(02:11:45):
he shows up and that he also is learning and
constantly learning, and then constantly kind of expanding sort of
how he sees the kind of segregation and white supremacy.
We want to remember that most of this travel again
before nineteen sixty four.

Speaker 1 (02:12:03):
We're talking about the Jim Crow North.

Speaker 11 (02:12:04):
So most hotels in the North, don't, you know, don't
serve black people, many restaurants, right, So part of this
is also Doctor King staying with lots of people and
so therefore also being educated about all of.

Speaker 1 (02:12:19):
These different issues across the country.

Speaker 11 (02:12:21):
Right. So he goes to Detroit in fifty eight and
they're taking him around and showing him the kind of
early ravages of urban renewal. Right, so all of these
issues in part come out and become part of the ways.

Speaker 1 (02:12:34):
That he's seeing kind of what has to change in
the United States.

Speaker 4 (02:12:38):
A couple of things really really jump out at me,
and that is as I'm sitting here, as I looked
at it.

Speaker 3 (02:12:51):
So I interviewed.

Speaker 31 (02:12:54):
Lowie Stokes, and of course her father was Lewis Stokes,
uh and you know, longtime member of Congress.

Speaker 4 (02:13:08):
And we talked about when her uncle, uncle Carl Stokes,
was elected mayor of Cleveland. She told me the stir
of Doctor King happened to be in the hotel room
when the news came in that he won, and uh,
he wanted doctor King to come downstairs with him, but no, no, no,

(02:13:35):
but doctor King said no. You know, it's like, no,
go on down. But before that night Stokes didn't want
It's okay even in the city organized mobilized black people.
That that's a fascinating story because it shows you the

(02:13:55):
fear of a black politician upsetting white people.

Speaker 1 (02:14:00):
Absolutely.

Speaker 11 (02:14:00):
And the story that I think is often told about
how Carl Stokes wins is that he in the story
I initially learned was that he gets the white vote.
But when you actually look at what happens and what
brings Carl Stokes to victory, particularly in that primary, is
the fact that there's this massive black turnout right that
many black organizations in the city, and including SCLC and

(02:14:24):
King spends a lot of time in Cleveland doing that
kind of voter turnout, doing that kind of voter registration,
and that it is black turnout that changes the game
for Carl Stokes in that primary.

Speaker 1 (02:14:40):
You know, two years before he'd lost.

Speaker 11 (02:14:44):
To you know who becomes mayor Loker and then and
then he wins that primary, and it is black turnout.

Speaker 3 (02:14:51):
That's changes. Let's live, let's brubet.

Speaker 4 (02:14:54):
Stokes doesn't want King, company, doesn't want King, doesn't want
him doing any no, and he narrowly loses. He narrowly loses.
King rebuffs him, says, I Steel coming. But and this
is where, which is why so important today Black people
in Cleveland said he can't win, so therefore I'm not

(02:15:19):
going to vote. I talk about The New York Times
did a story or a group of black They talked
to a group of black voters after Trump, after Trump
was inaugurated, and there was a woman, a thirty nine
year old black woman named Milwaukee, who said a teacher's
aide who says she did not vote because she thought
Trump was going to win. Well, you not voting guaranteed

(02:15:42):
he was gonna win.

Speaker 3 (02:15:43):
So if one hundred two.

Speaker 4 (02:15:45):
Hundred thousand others thought like you, that's how Trump won.

Speaker 3 (02:15:47):
Well that was the case.

Speaker 4 (02:15:49):
Stokes doesn't win because black people said, hey, he ain't
got a shot. But mkay understands black power. And it's
spending lots of time talking to people walking the streets, mobilizing, organizing.

Speaker 3 (02:16:03):
That's how Stokes wins. So here you have.

Speaker 4 (02:16:07):
So Carl Stokes, you ain't you were scared to have
King stand with you and your loves and leading.

Speaker 3 (02:16:14):
What the King stands with you and puts in the work,
he wins.

Speaker 11 (02:16:19):
Right, And that idea of black power, that organized black
political power, we see it in Cleveland.

Speaker 1 (02:16:27):
But yeah, Carl Stokes being afraid.

Speaker 11 (02:16:29):
And the story I heard is that that Stokes does
not want him even that in Victory Night anywhere near him.
That what King and Abernathy say is that Stokes said
he was going to call, and he does not call.
But but that that black turnout, that black organization by
sort of black organizations in Cleveland and SCLC changes the game.

Speaker 4 (02:16:54):
Well, here's what he mention, your black power, because that's
also a part of the deal that King never published.

Speaker 3 (02:17:00):
King would not publicly.

Speaker 4 (02:17:02):
Stokely Carmichael, but even in his book where do We
Go for here in Koso community, King said black power
nothing but a slogan that.

Speaker 3 (02:17:08):
Was no agenda behind it.

Speaker 4 (02:17:10):
And so in this case he viewed black power differently,
and so where they differed, he simply felt that Stokely
just saying black power didn't achieve anything that needs to
be agenda behind it.

Speaker 3 (02:17:24):
So him understanding that if.

Speaker 4 (02:17:27):
We mobilize organized to get a Carl Stows elected, that
is actual black.

Speaker 11 (02:17:32):
Power, absolutely, And he meets with one of the interesting things.
Three weeks before he's assassinated. He goes by Amiria I
mean a Baraka's apartment and visits Baraka and sort of
some of the initial kind of organizing an idea with
what will become, right, the convention movement that Baraka will

(02:17:52):
work on and then ultimately the National Black Political Convention.
And Gary begins in those conversations that day, right about
what does it mean to coalesce national Black political power? Right?

Speaker 1 (02:18:07):
And King will joke with stokely, right, let's get the power.

Speaker 11 (02:18:10):
We don't like not the slogan, and then King is like,
but we got the slogan and not the power. So
this idea that also again if we see part of
what doctor King is doing is constantly kind of doubling
down and kind of kind of going deeper. And part
of that is about seeing that it's not just about
an individual vote, right, it's about what collectively that vote

(02:18:34):
can do. Because again in some you know, in many
places in the North, black people could vote, but that
did not mean they could protect their interests right, and
that therefore, what sort of real voting rights, what real
voting power looked like, was building kind of organized black
political power.

Speaker 1 (02:18:53):
And then I mean also around economic power. But that's
you know, we could talk about that too.

Speaker 19 (02:19:15):
Hatred on the streets, a horrific scene, a white nationalists
rally that descended into deadly violence.

Speaker 3 (02:19:23):
Well, white people are living.

Speaker 24 (02:19:27):
As anagrad proach frum Mont storms the US capitals show.

Speaker 4 (02:19:32):
We're about to see the laws where I call white
minority resistance. We have seen white folks in this country
who simply cannot tolerate black folks voting.

Speaker 22 (02:19:41):
I think what we're seeing is the inevitable result of
violent denial.

Speaker 7 (02:19:46):
This is part of American history.

Speaker 3 (02:19:48):
Every time that people of color and progress, whether real or.

Speaker 31 (02:19:52):
Symbolic, there has been but Carold Anderson at every university
calls white rage as a backlash.

Speaker 4 (02:19:58):
This is the rack of the proud boys and boogaloo
boys America.

Speaker 3 (02:20:01):
There's going to be more of this.

Speaker 27 (02:20:05):
This country just getting increasingly racist in its behaviors and its.

Speaker 1 (02:20:09):
Attitudes because of the fear of white people.

Speaker 4 (02:20:13):
But that they're taking our job, they're taking out with resources,
they're taking.

Speaker 3 (02:20:17):
Out women, this is white Fear.

Speaker 4 (02:20:46):
When when my book White Fear came out, my book
White Fear, How the Browning of America Is making White
Folks Lose their Minds came out. I sent this book
to a number of black journalists across the country who
have who on network, television, network and cable television to

(02:21:09):
send to some white journalists as well, and a black
journalists I'm not going to say who hits me up
and says that that when the book was taken to
this host producers, the white producers did not like the

(02:21:36):
title of my book. The title is White Fear, How
the Browning of America is making White folks lose their minds.
The white so then the black host says, and I'm saying, well,
you know that the thesis of my book is literally
what has been written in the New York Times, in
Time and Newsweek, in pr xeos and I literally sit

(02:21:58):
the articles. The black hole says to me, well, you
know you printing to the choir.

Speaker 3 (02:22:03):
I said, no, I need you to be the pastor.

Speaker 4 (02:22:07):
I said, I said, are you aware that I literally
write about those same white journalists in the book and
the reason we don't have these conversations. It's because they
won't have them on the air. And so when I
was reading this man, I said wow, and I was
shocked with the person who did this. You write nineteen

(02:22:31):
sixty seven, journalist David Haberstam spent ten days with King
for a lengthy nineteen sixty seven Harper's feature Traveling with
King to Cleveland, and you go on and write these
you talk about. Haberstam wrote books, and John Lewis described
him as quote the only one covering us.

Speaker 3 (02:22:48):
You say, but here, Haberstam's.

Speaker 4 (02:22:50):
Framing was different, with no mention of long standing movements
in these northern cities. Haberstam called King quote arrogant and
in danger of losing his way. Haberstam longed for the
head quote heady days unquote when King was quote was
our beloved unquote, and northern ghettos. Haberstam claimed, the schools

(02:23:10):
are terrible, but there's no one man making them bad
by his own ill will. The jobs are bad, but
the reasons negroes aren't ready for decent jobs are complicated unquote.

Speaker 3 (02:23:25):
Then you say this here, which really jumps out at me.

Speaker 4 (02:23:28):
You said, for Haberstam, northern injustice might be bad, but
its causes were memorphous, and Northern blacks weren't necessarily quote
ready unquote for decent jobs anyway.

Speaker 3 (02:23:42):
Now, this is somebody, and I have.

Speaker 4 (02:23:45):
A number of his books, who has been hailed as
this paragon of virtue, this amazing journalist, this unbelievable, empathetic writer,
who who who frankly made his made his bones, he
made his uh is built on covering the black freedom

(02:24:12):
movement some called the civil rights movement. And so here
so again, so here's a white journalist, a white male
journalist who they believe really understood us. And when I
see this is that northern blacks weren't necessarily ready for.

Speaker 3 (02:24:28):
Decent jobs anyway.

Speaker 4 (02:24:29):
I thought about John Wayne, who was a white supremacist
who literally said that blacks weren't even ready for integration.
When I see that, so so this, this is a
fundamental problem here where this is a This is a
white male journalist who is beloved, who frames King in

(02:24:50):
a way, and he is shaping the national narrative.

Speaker 3 (02:24:54):
So when you read his article of Halberstam says that
speutrual and over and.

Speaker 11 (02:25:03):
Over we see that word arrogant being used against doctor
King a lot of these years, and particularly when he
starts again to turn his like when he's talking about
right a Cleveland or in New York or in la
Right now, he's arrogant, Right, he's out of his place.
And then that second point, right, which is that again

(02:25:23):
one of the other ways that Northerners tended to excuse
the the inequalities in their cities was this idea that
there was you know, culture, and that people weren't ready,
or that people didn't have the right work ethic, or
people didn't have.

Speaker 1 (02:25:38):
The right educational values, and over and over that would.

Speaker 11 (02:25:43):
Become part of the ways then they would cover sort
of black life in their cities as dysfunctional, as.

Speaker 1 (02:25:52):
A problem as to sort of maintain that idea. Right
that it wasn't that it was the schools were segregated.

Speaker 11 (02:26:00):
It was that black people didn't value education or there
was this dysfunctional culture. It wasn't that we had different
we needed, we had differential segregation in parts of the city.

Speaker 1 (02:26:10):
It was that black people didn't clean up their neighborhoods.

Speaker 11 (02:26:13):
Right. And so here we see somebody like David Halberstam,
like you like you're saying who makes his career right
covering Nashville, covering the civil rights movement. But when we
get closer to home, that coverage is very different, and
like you're saying, it then shapes how we understand the North,

(02:26:37):
how we understand King's work in the North, and how
we understand like black life in cities like Cleveland or
New York.

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Speaker 3 (02:28:12):
Of social media. Two more questions.

Speaker 4 (02:28:33):
The first question I'll ask is now, ask every author
this year, in your writing, in your research, in your interviews,
what was the wild moment for you? What was the
moment that caused you to go, oh my god, this
is crazy, I can't believe this, or I never even

(02:28:56):
know this.

Speaker 11 (02:28:59):
And I think the wild moment is like sort of
starting in that research in LA and being like, wait
a sec.

Speaker 1 (02:29:09):
All these books make it seem like King's just discovers
the problem with black people in LA.

Speaker 3 (02:29:14):
After this was not what you were researching.

Speaker 1 (02:29:18):
Nope, go ahead, So that and then and then once.

Speaker 11 (02:29:23):
You ask the question, it's sort of like you know
those you know, the kaleidoscopes we had as kids right
where you turn the and then all of a sudden,
the whole picture changes. And so in some ways, when
I started asking that question, when I started saying, Okay,
maybe this story we've been told about King discovering the
North post nineteen sixty five, about northern black people, not

(02:29:45):
you know, not having an interest in King, maybe that
story is not what we have been told, and then
just finding it everywhere. So both he is everywhere joining
with movements all around this country, not discovering northern racism
because in fact, he had gone to school in the North.

Speaker 1 (02:30:07):
And so King, at age twenty right, has experienced.

Speaker 11 (02:30:11):
Housing discrimination and housing segregation because he's lived it. King
has experienced the limits of northern liberalism because he's lived it.
So again, the whole kind of way that the story
that still persists had so many holes in it.

Speaker 1 (02:30:30):
I think that was the most surprising thing. It wasn't
one revelation.

Speaker 11 (02:30:34):
It was just how much there was to find, and
how much things that we thought we knew.

Speaker 3 (02:30:38):
Right.

Speaker 1 (02:30:38):
I knew he'd gone to be you. I knew he'd
gone to Krozer.

Speaker 11 (02:30:41):
But the way we tend to talk about that is
who's he studying with what's he studying, not where is
he and how is that experience going to affect how
he thinks about this country in the world.

Speaker 3 (02:30:53):
Second to last question. I thought I had two, but
one just jumped up.

Speaker 4 (02:30:56):
I think it's really important because oftentimes it is grossly
over looked. How critical was his wife Coretta Scott King
to this as well. We only view him as one dimensional.
She is portrayed as the woman who on the road.
She's saying she raised money and then she went back

(02:31:18):
home to take care of the kids and to tend
to the house. That's not the fact. The reality is
a lot of his thinking derived from her arriving at
that place before he did.

Speaker 11 (02:31:31):
Absolutely, I mean, I think we need to understand sort
of how fierce and how I mean in many ways
when they meet, she's more of a political activist than
he is.

Speaker 1 (02:31:41):
Scott goes to Antioch College in Ohio.

Speaker 11 (02:31:45):
It is both at expanding experience, but she also, like King,
encounters kind of northern racism the limits of northern liberalism.
At Antioch, she's introduced to the Progressive Party. They're running
a third party challenge in nineteen forty eight against Truman
and the Democrats on issues domestically of segregation on issues

(02:32:06):
in terms of foreign policy, a kind of anti Cold
War militarism. So in some ways that many of us
associate kind of the triple evils right of racism, poverty,
and militarism.

Speaker 1 (02:32:18):
Right with those last years of his life.

Speaker 11 (02:32:20):
Those ideas, and now I'm not saying they don't deepen
and ripe in, but those ideas are already there when
he meets her in nineteen fifty two, Coretta Scott has
met Paul Robeson, has met Bayard.

Speaker 1 (02:32:35):
Rustin before she meets Martin Martin Luther King.

Speaker 11 (02:32:39):
Right, she meets both of those men through her work
as a student delegate and work with the Progressive Party.
So who she is when they meet when they get married,
just to tell you a story. When they get married
in nineteen fifty three, she wi't wear white, she doesn't
wear a long dress.

Speaker 1 (02:32:58):
She wears tea lane like blue dress.

Speaker 11 (02:33:01):
And she insists to her very imposing father in law
to take obey out of their vows because it makes
her feel like an indentured servant. Okay, So this is
who Coretta Scott is, and who is Martin Luther King's
beloved And again nineteen fifty three.

Speaker 1 (02:33:18):
This is not nineteen sixty eight, right, nineteen fifty three,
no obey.

Speaker 11 (02:33:23):
She keeps her name right, despite the fact that the
press often just will refer to her as missus Martin
Luther King. If you hear her, she is always Coretta
Scott King, that global perspective that we often associate again with.

Speaker 1 (02:33:38):
The last years of his life. She has much earlier.

Speaker 11 (02:33:43):
For instance, nineteen sixty two, she joins a women Strike
for Peace delegation to Geneva around pressuring the United States
and the Soviet Union to sign.

Speaker 1 (02:33:51):
A nuclear test bantry. She's very sort of.

Speaker 11 (02:33:53):
Committed to kind of global peace, anti nuclear She leads
a march in nineteen sixty two to the UN. She
meets with the head of the UN so these global issues,
and then when he gets the Nobel Prize at nineteen
sixty four, she talks about it as both a joy,
but she also sees it as a burden because she
sees them having a much greater responsibility to the world,

(02:34:18):
and in particular to coming out against US policy in Vietnam,
and from nineteen sixty five on she is out against
the war in Vietnam, and this is tremendously controversial, it's
tremendously brave, right, and she's really leading the country, not

(02:34:41):
I mean she's leading him, but she's also leading the
country around this issue. And again I think we often
see sort of we miss right that, like you're saying,
many of doctor King's sort of ideas are being shaped
in conversation, in you know, in her politics as well.

Speaker 4 (02:35:02):
Last question, what if we apply, if we apply what
King was trying to do outside of the South, then
what lessons do we take from this today in terms
of how we should be approaching what's happening in this country.

(02:35:23):
What is happening in this country I believe, I fundamentally
believe is not a South versus North, but as a
city urban problem and everywhere else it's nirvana, it's heaven.

Speaker 1 (02:35:43):
So I think there's a number of lessons.

Speaker 11 (02:35:46):
The first is a part of again looking at the
King of the North, is about also challenging the misuse
of doctor King against movements today. Right, My students talk
about how King is often rolled out as the ultimate
gaslight right against Black Lives Matter, against the Palestine protest. Right,
you're not doing it right more like Martin, you know,

(02:36:08):
he was respectable, He was passive and in many ways
missing that the very same criticisms of young people today.
Young activists today are being waged against Doctor King.

Speaker 1 (02:36:22):
Right. So that's the first lesson, right is what does
it mean to be more like King?

Speaker 19 (02:36:26):
Right?

Speaker 11 (02:36:27):
To be more like King is in fact like many
young activists today. The second is the King is a
believer in nonviolence, but that nonviolence is about disrupting the
status quote, it's disrupting the comfort of inequality. And so
that nonviolence is bus boycotts, it's sit ins, it's rent strikes,

(02:36:49):
it's school boycotts, it's disrupting city life. One of my
favorite quotes from Doctor King in nineteen sixty four Brooklyn Corp.
Is they've been protesting housing and school segregation and job
discrimination in the city and gotten very little change. And
so they decide they're going to stall cars on the

(02:37:09):
freeway out of the World's Fair. The World's Fair is
opening in Queens in nineteen sixty four in New York City,
and as you might imagine, black moderates, white moderates, city
leaders go crazy, this is horrible, how could they do that?
And they try to get Doctor King to come out
against this and he refuses, and he says, we do

(02:37:30):
not need allies more devoted to order than to justice. Right,
And then he says, I've heard a lot of talk
about our direct action alienating our friends. If our direct
action alienates our friends, they never were really our friends.

Speaker 3 (02:37:45):
Right.

Speaker 11 (02:37:46):
So I think that the necessity of disrupting the comfort
of inequality the comfort of injustice.

Speaker 1 (02:37:53):
And then I think the third lesson we get.

Speaker 11 (02:37:55):
From sort of both Kings is the ability to double down, right,
to go bigger, go wider.

Speaker 1 (02:38:02):
Right that I think.

Speaker 11 (02:38:03):
Sometimes we forget how hard it is and how scary
it is, and how scared they are. Right, that that
part of what people like Martin Luther King and credit
Scott King bring is the ability.

Speaker 1 (02:38:17):
To move within fear, not that they stop being scared.

Speaker 11 (02:38:20):
Right. So I think we have to disabuse ourselves of
this idea that you just move past fear. No, but
also their ability to double down that in the face
of pressure, in the face of opposition, in the face
of threats, to both stand fast and then also to
go bigger and go harder, folks.

Speaker 4 (02:38:41):
The book is King of the North Martin Luther King
Junior's Life of Struggle Outside the South, of Jean the
O'Hara's genie is great that you were researching something else
and stumble upon the amazing work that ribboned Dot the
Martin of the King Junior.

Speaker 3 (02:39:01):
Was doing there in the North.

Speaker 4 (02:39:03):
I did not ask this question, but I'll make the statement,
and I'm sure you agree because you're reporting lays it out.

Speaker 3 (02:39:09):
The other things is here.

Speaker 4 (02:39:11):
King was criticized for people say, oh, he's swooping in,
but the reality is he was called by people to
come in. King supported local efforts on the ground. It
wasn't about him stealing attention when he was called. He
was elevating what the local folks were doing and giving
them credit and backing up what the fights they were

(02:39:34):
doing on the ground as well. And so that's too often,
I think a mistake that people make as well, thinking
he was just swooping in for all the attention. He
was helping local organizers amplify their work.

Speaker 3 (02:39:46):
Thank you appreciate it. Fascinating book.

Speaker 1 (02:39:48):
Thanks a lot, Thanks so much.

Speaker 24 (02:40:00):
The body had to return with the day of his
se

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