Remembering Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

From the 22 News Plus studio, this is 22 News In Focus with Patrick Berry. Hello everyone and welcome to this edition of In Focus. I am your host Patrick Berry. Today we are recognizing and honoring the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Joining me across the desk today from Westfield State University is Dr. Nicholas Aieta. He is the History and Philosophy Department Chair from Westfield State, as I mentioned, and he has been gracious enough to come join me today to talk about Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Thank you Dr. Aieta for joining me. Let's start early life, you know, born, how he became, you know, got into the, you know, became a minister, maybe some of his schooling, some of his early influences on how he would lead his life. So he's born relatively advantaged, I suppose you'd say. Certainly well-educated parents and expected to do things in terms of getting a college education. He enters the seminary, similar to his father, and then eventually will also attend additional graduate school. He's educated mostly in Georgia and then eventually does one degree at Boston University. And when he's in the seminary in the early 1950s, he is in the early experience of dealing with segregation as an adult. So he certainly had to experience it as a young person by that point, but now he's beginning to experience it as an adult. And at one of his early postings in Alabama, he is experiencing this not only for himself, but also for the members of his church. And he starts to become involved in, and he was certainly not alone in this. There were other individuals who had been participating in active resistance against segregation in public spaces and segregation in schooling. And the thing that raises his prominence certainly both in the American South, but also nationally, is the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama. And he's chosen as one of the leaders for this. He's not the only sole leader, certainly, but as a religious pastor, minister, he's seen as somebody who can be a safe, I guess would be a word, representative for the public face of this protest movement, which lasts for a little over a year and is a highly successful example of using economics and nonviolence in order to try to affect some level of change. So that coincides with a creation of and a request that he become the leader for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and that sort of is our springboard initially, getting us into the late 50s and early 60s. His wife Coretta, like a lot of men of the era, the wife played an important role in his mission. Right. And not only as a minister, but certainly also as a national leader and as a civil rights leader. It's not uncommon to look at the time period and recognize that women who were important leaders, people like Ella Baker, for example, and others, are not always necessarily at the forefront of the conversation. King is unique, we'll talk about this, obviously, in a bit here, but is unique in the sense that he is the only named holiday in the United States. The other named ones went away over time, were combined, for example, so Washington's Day, President's Day, yeah, and so on. And part of the reason for that is, is that longstanding legacy that's connected to him, but yes, there's a wide array of individuals who are supporting him in this success. In the late 50s, about 10 years before his death, there was an attempted assassination of him. This fails, but was a lot closer than people might want to think. An individual who believed that, and this will play a role in the future here, an individual who believed that he was conspiring with communists against them personally, it was a female assassin, stabbed him with a letter opener while he was in New York. In New York City, right? Yeah, and so he ends up surviving this, and that's a pretty important survival there because then in the 1960s, he's going to emerge as a prominent focal point for additional civil rights action. So as he is morphing into that role of a national figure, there were a lot of incidents throughout the nation. So he started off in the Deep South, but he started to recognize incidents across the nation, which hit him hard because he wanted to be able to speak out and bring people together in a peaceful, calm way to put African-Americans on a level playing field. Yeah, one of the things in the 50s that he is speaking about, and it will continue into the 1960s, is equal access to education. Of course, prominently, the national Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education in Topeka, Kansas, that decision emanates from some other decisions in other places. There's an important case in California, for example, that's focused on segregation of people of Mexican descent in public schools in the Westminster School District, and that becomes the inspiration for the legal case in Kansas. When the decision comes down, King points out that this is a decision, I'll quote him a little bit here, this is a decision that comes as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of human captivity. This is because he believed that education was a freeing entity, basically, and it's an important point that, yes, he's talking initially there about what we would call K-12 education, but he also believed very mightily that higher education should also provide that kind of access. And for him, one of the things he's pointing out in this conversation that he was giving in 1957, he describes segregation in education as an evil, really, and I'm quoting him here, an evil that had occupied the throne of American life for several decades. And pushing that change is of great importance because for him, he looked at education as then leading to better opportunities for individuals economically, which becomes a huge concern, particularly as his career evolves. Nat Malkus And we are up on our first commercial break. When we come back after that break, we will talk about how his career and national prominence evolves into the early 60s. We'll be right back. This is 22 News In Focus with Patrick Berry. Welcome back, everyone, to this edition of In Focus. Here in the 22 News Plus studios joining me today is Dr. Nicholas Aida. He is the chair, the history and philosophy department chair at Westfield State University. We're talking about the Dr. Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. Dr. Aida, thank you very much for joining me today. We talked about the early part of Dr. King's life leading up to the late 50s, his involvement in activism, really just on the cusp of him becoming a much more national, a much more prominent national figure. Why does he get thrust into that role? Was it a choosing? Was he designated that person by higher people within the African-American community? Dr. Nicholas Aida Partially, once he is selected as the leader for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, some of it is, I don't want to say it's out of his hands, it's not, but there are some things that transpire that definitely there are other figures who are asking him to do certain things. So he's in Alabama initially, as we discussed, but he was returning to Georgia later at the request of the leadership and other members in the SCLC. And part of that's about trying to find focus to the movement. So, okay, we were talking about education. We've worked a little bit here. Now we have some efforts in the early 1960s to push desegregation of higher education, most prominently at the University of Mississippi in 1962. But we also have questions about, well, did the 1957 Civil Rights Act do what we wanted it to do? And so there's issues there. And then there's efforts in a variety of places, including Albany, Georgia, and then in Atlanta and elsewhere to try to expand the movement and get into, and also connect with these other things that are happening because he's not, for example, sorry, but telling the students in Greensboro, North Carolina, you should participate in sit-ins in order to help desegregate public lunch counters. But they're doing it and they're adopting these nonviolent techniques. And in some cases, that's about training that's going on at places like the Highland School and so on. Now, he is one of the greatest orators of all time. I mean, is that part of why he got to that level? Because maybe some others in the Southern Leadership, SLC. SCLC. SCLC, sorry, another acronym. Other people in that organization just don't have the gravitas that he had? Well, I think part of it is about his status as a minister. Okay. The beacon of hope and nonviolence. And that also has a great deal of importance in a variety of different communities, white and African American alike. And so that religious background and primary job was seen as something that could be leveraged to make people actually start to think about these questions of inequality, both from an economic standpoint, and of course, from a racial standpoint. He's early in the 1950s as well. In this post-World War II period, there's a lot of uncertainty, a lot of distress over obviously what happened during the Second World War, but also overgrowing fears about what's going to happen next, you know? And so, a religious figure is seen as important. He is supported by Billy Graham, who was obviously well-known even at that time national figure looking for trying to create an expanded connection with Christianity, evangelical Christianity in particular in the United States. And so, Graham's support of someone like King was seen as a possible – A bridging partnership because you have Graham, a very prominent white religious figure, and King, a very prominent African American figure. Yeah, and so that I think helps as well. And then he is involved in a lot of different areas. So, he's helping out with higher education issues. He's pushing the government to consider issues on economic concerns, but also on additional civil rights efforts related to voting. He's very prominently connected to the efforts in Alabama and other southern states to change access to registration for voting. And then, of course, from 1963 forward, there's another elevation of fame after the People's March in Washington. Now, again, not everybody loved him, right? Malcolm X calls it the People's Farce on Washington. It's funny you bring up Malcolm X because there were a number of other African American individuals into the late 50s, into the 60s that didn't necessarily agree with King and his methods. Yeah, I think that the nonviolence for some people is difficult to take. And if we go back historically and look at the post-Civil War period, we can see that the African American community took advantage of the potential freedoms that were being guaranteed by the national government at that time, however, had to defend themselves on their own largely, particularly after the early 1880s. And then once the civil rights cases in 1883 do away with a lot of the reforms that took place there, the African American community is largely on their own. And they are using it when necessary. They are using violence in order to protect their families and so on. That is not something that is a continuum, but by the 1960s, there is kind of this divide. Are we to respond to violence with nonviolence? And as a pastor, you preach love your neighbor nonviolence. We are up on our second commercial break. When we come back, we will talk about the tail end of King's life and then what has happened since then. Stay with us, we're back in just a moment. This is 22 News In Focus with Patrick Berry. This is 22 News In Focus with Patrick Berry. Welcome back, everyone, to this edition of In Focus. I'm your host, Patrick Berry. Today in the studio with me across the desk is Dr. Nicholas Aieda. He is the History and Philosophy Chair at Westfield State University. Dr. Aieda, thank you very much for joining me today. We are talking about the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. since today is the day we honor and recognize his contributions to the United States, actually globally, racial equality globally. Before we went to break, we were talking about the period of the 60s where he became a very prominent individual, but his prominence also put a spotlight or a microscope on him from some of the federal agencies. Yeah, so there are detractors. Obviously, not everybody certainly wanted racial equality, and increasingly as he changed, not changed, but expanded his message to include things like economic equality, looking at issues of gender, and then looking at the expansion of resources in relation to the Vietnam War, he comes under criticism in a variety of ways. The first instance really is that the FBI starts monitoring him in 1963, and that will continue until his death in 1968, and that's authorized by the Attorney General at the time, Robert Kennedy. The surveillance includes a lot of not technically speaking legal approaches, so tapping his phones. Not out of the ordinary during that period of time, especially under Hoover. Yeah, and it calls back to an earlier period in the 20th century where the government sometimes took action against people who were suspected of being connected to communism, and so on. This was true in the post-World War I period, and again, immediately in the post-World War II period as well. So he is a target in these federal agencies, and he was seen as somebody who was potentially fomenting an unraveling, if you will, of the Republic of the United States. He will also draw the ire of some other individuals. I mentioned earlier how Reverend Billy Graham is an ally of his, but once he also starts to speak about Vietnam being a negative for the United States, then Graham slips away as an ally, as does President Johnson. And so that creates some other issues, but from King's perspective, the war was one that was not only occupying the time and resources of the United States when they should have been focused on issues of economic and racial equality, but also a misplaced war, one that was focused on taking away the potential independence of an entity in the form of Vietnam itself. So leading up to his assassination in 1968... Well, some people looked at it that he was leading to division within American society, but that's not necessarily a fair assessment of what he's doing. And keep in mind that for some people, this is deeply influenced by their own personal biases and racial persuasion and so on. So they might look at him as a rebel of sorts, as somebody who is trying to alter the fabric of what they understand the United States to be. And so in that respect, he might be seen that way. But what you also see in this 1963 to 1968 is an expansion of people with whom he's working. So he's working with not only the Southern Christian Leadership Council, obviously, but the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committees. He's working with groups and a variety of civil rights leaders from a variety of different regions, so not only the North, but also the South, American West, and so on. I mean, not everything he does is a success in this time period, certainly. But we do see some big change in terms of access to voting and registration drives and that sort of thing. And then also the economic question, which is really what drives him to Memphis in this speech that he gives in April of 1968. So in April of 68, he's assassinated. And we fast forward, it wasn't until almost 20 years later, it becomes a national holiday. Yeah, and that's kind of rife with controversy to a degree. He is celebrated almost immediately. So for example, there are organizations across the United States that by the fall of 68 and 69 are doing something. But it's the Reagan administration that signs into law the federal holiday, that's in 1983. And then it takes another 17 years really to get it all kind of in a row in a variety of different states. And there's a bunch of different reasons for that. I think somewhat ironically, sometimes it comes down to economics. People don't want a certain number of holidays and so on. But the real problem is that in many cases, states were clearly still struggling with both the economic message and the message of racial equality that King delivered. And he's an individual who is looking at trying to bring people together, and yet the actions of individual states, including those that decided to, yes, we'll honor Martin Luther King Jr., but we're going to do it in concert with confederate leaders like Robert E. Lee and Thomas Jackson. Shockingly southern states. You know, and this is not only offensive just on the face of it, but is a real sort of stick in the eye really to the message that King was bringing across. And as we stand today, Martin Luther King Jr. holiday is the only holiday in the United States named after a person. Yeah, a singular person. We've gotten rid of Washington Day, we've gotten rid of Columbus Day. Right. So we've got on the national level, he is, well, the only American, I guess you could say, because Washington's holiday got combined with Lincoln. And for King, in relation to the spirit of Dr. King, I mean, I think one of the things that people want to think about is, and the Westfield State, President Thompson points this out, this is about service. It's about what can you do that's going to better serve humanity. Right. And that's really what the day should be celebrated for and acknowledged. And I would say that in my own experience, it's been an important part of making decisions about education. I visited Memphis on Martin Luther King Day in 1999 to go to the Civil Rights Museum. So there are different reasons that you end up, you take action, not only in terms of learning more about the history, but then also what can you do in your classrooms or in your daily life that is going to celebrate the legacy. And that's what we do today is celebrate the legacy and give back to our communities and keep this country moving forward. I can't thank you enough for joining me today to educate me and our viewers about the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Thank you so much. Thanks.