tv Tavis Smiley PBS April 11, 2017 6:30am-7:01am PDT
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good evening from new york, i'm tavis smiley. 50 years ago martin luther king jr. delivered his prescient, beyond vietnam, just 30 minutes away from this studio, a courageous and singular call to conscience, a map for the future based on justice. tonight, we conclude our meeting on dr. king, speaking with our anti-war and social justice theme and what is called the triple racism of poverty. glad you have joined us, a look back at dr. king's vietnam
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so pleased to be joined tonight by professor and author, mark lamont, and director of change, rashad robinson, closing out a powerful week, speaking of powerful when you first came to know this speech what did you make of it? you went to moorehouse, where king went to school, what did you make of it and how did you compare it in contrast with vietn vietnam, and what i'm sure you knew about, the i have a dream speech. >> it changed the way i understood king, because now i understood him from a radical condition, coming from a nationalist background, i found we have to fight back, the other thing i found was the moral,
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king linked his peace to jesus, and said it can't be restricted to the united states. it has to be a global practice, i also was sold on a global vision of activism. >> actually, for those who don't know where you work tell us the story. >> before there was a montgomery bus incident, and rosa parks sat down there was a place there the middle of nowhere, tennessee, where i'm born and raised where folks came together to train up and share stories and strategy and it led to not only the montgomery bus incident, but to other young people all across the country and southern region in terms of how to do this movement, the black liberation and justice work. and especially in the context of this 50th anniversary speech, vincent harding wrote it, it was a southern story, riverside got
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it. but many of us that are reclaiming the mlk movement over the last several years i think like mark said like who is this man that stood out and in a time where it was not cool or fun to be anti-war, to be pro peace, to be connecting movement to faith. to be having conversations about the centrality of the liberation fight, and calling out captivatism and racism and something that many of us are trying to live up into while also recognizing for king to say that speech took lots and lots of grass roots everyday people to develop the stories mentioned in the speech. >> i'm glad you mentioned the late great dr. vincent harding. i did a documentary years ago called "the call to conscience" that really does conduct this peach from beginnispeech -- spe
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vincent harding came from denver to be a part of that show that i taped at the riverside church here in new york and he brought with him his original draft of the speech. and so you can go to pbs.org and recall that speech, we just rebroadcast it in january so usually around the holiday we broadcast it, as a two-night special, but you brought that original draft, the beyond vietnam speech, and you can see the lines. it is powerful to be in that place with the guy who wrote it and the original draft. we broadcast it every year, because it says something about highlander a y er er and the wo done, i'm glad you mentioned his name. i want to get you guys to unpack it as you see it at least but i want to give you the first bite of this. this is a quote from the beyond vietnam speech 50 years ago delivered by dr. king of course. these are revolutionary times all over the globe, men are
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revolting against oppression, that was king 50 years ago, i ask later out of the wounds of a frail world in which we live today are there systems of justice and equality still being born today? >> absolutely, i think there are movements continually being born that are rejecting some of the old ways of how things are being done, that are seeking about how we make deeper connections of other movements but are also able to see beyond the narrow idea of what is supposed to be civil rights. but what is so powerful with king's speech he is pushing back with sort of this narrow idea of what this place should be, what he should talk about, what are black issues or not black issues. color change, we're the only national black civilization that
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doesn't take corporate money, it's the hallworks of how we think about campaign work and how we think about taking on some of our activities and every two months i get someone that tells me you don't really know how to play the game, right? you all would be much more powerful if you knew how to sort of operate, sort of within this sort of context, without sort of a deep understanding of what we are trying to fight, who we are trying to hold accountable and at the ends of the day what power has to look like in the 21st century for black people, if governments and corporations are not nervous about disappointing us then we have nothing. and that means we have to play on a wide range of field and can't just think very narrowly of what our issues are or not. what will consistently be the canary in the coal mine that will widely impact the country. often times we say in the color of change when america gets the
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cold, black people get the flu, and in order to deal with that we have to be visionary about what we see as our issues and cause. >> back to everything you just said, besides the first thing which is the analysis of whether or not new systems are being born, we need new systems, i agree, i'm a prisoner of hope. but my fear is we're trying to reform systems that need to be completely taken down. so we're excited about health care. but it's really universal health insurance, we have not really fundamentally dismantled the system, ie, single payer. but we're trying to get rid of the ideas that equates justice with confinement. we can reimagine the world that universities don't look like multi-national corporations, that was king's point, we have to reimage the system.
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>> one of things king said around the time of giving this speech we talked to harry belfonte earlier this week, about the earlier speech he said to harry belfonte at his kitchen table at his house in new york, he said harry i fear for all we have done to fight integration, we have integrated into a burning house, harry says all right, what do we do? king says we have to become firemen. by the time he gets 67, he thinks he integrated into a burning house where years ago he was fighting integration. >> some would say let it burn and build something different, we could have that conversation, but at the very least we need to know the systems don't work in the interest of justice. >> no, i think that is right. and i think our people know the why. i think they definitely see the house is on fire. the question is not the why,
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it's the how, or how do we not just reform broken systems but really transform them? we've seen folks all over the country come together and with the movement for black lives and social justice organizations, we have to figure out how to get past the transactional relationships that only produce formative works. >> that is what i'm speaking to, your point around health care is a perfect one. compromising around health care, which is a problematic compromise not been the stopping point for the last, but been sort of the starting point towards what we really want. it would have been the metric along the way to know we were sort of shifting or breaking down structures but it was the stopping point. and often what i see which has been a problem in our civil rights movement we don't look deeply at the text, we look at the moment. and we celebrate sort of like
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the moments of a signing of a bill as the stopping point or the moment of a march as a stopping point, not the sort of vision and the demand behind how we got to that point. so we stop at the voting rights act when that was the best compromise we could have gotten in '65, we work to protect that instead of advancing on it. >> so mark i want to go back to the point that rashad made, and it was the speech, which was ne kb -- negros stay in your lane, they didn't like him saying that our democracy is threatened by racism, and poverty. his point was we need to fix our society. what is fascinating, almost 50 years later barack obama was pretty much treated the same way, even though he got elected,
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obama was still told in myriad ways, negro, stay in your lane, what do you think about it 50 years later, stay in your lane? >> it's a very narrow idea. king says don't fight back. we don't want a revolution of armed negros, king is the man, you talk about your own work, suddenly, at the convention it's a whole different world, they have a very narrow idea of what their world is supposed to be. they want them to be engaged in peace talks, they want barack obama to talk to black folk in particular ways, but at the expense of a broader reach of capitalism. my frustration with obama would be he bought and played into it far too often. in 2017 i think we have to say as citizens, activists, humans
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as believers of the faith tradition that was occupied this is our lane and our lane that justice has to be everybody's lane. king didn't have any special entitlement to justice talk, but i'm not sure that 50 years later we as a people are still yet comfortable talking about foreign policy, even if it comes to pointing that out owe. >> i spent the last two years doing work in jerusalem, and worked a lot with palestinians. that is a very heated issue. what i find fascinating in the united states people don't feel connected to it even though our tax dollars fund the occupation. we don't think about are syria and jerusalem enough. we have to be invested, not just because we're human beings and people are also dying, but also there is a connection between poverty here and militarism there. >> and our silence on these
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issues gives greater license. the ways in which black folks and our story has deep moral authority. and the moral authority is used and ex-portd ported, ways in wh u.n. can talk about progress and other areas, and our silence on the issue creates the cycle of ability for america to do some of its work when black folks are not speaking out or pushing back, i agree with you 100%. >> i'm going to push a little. because i think has someone rooted in black radical tradition especially from the southern freedom movement that many, many, many times the way we define this is actually very inclusive. in fact because we usually have more in common with our comrades in puerto rico or the congo than we do with folks in seattle and other places. so i think there have been more grass roots folks including
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myself, the granddaughter of a maid that used to clean houses on the lookout mountain of tennessee that dr. king used to refer to. actually got to go to palestine last year following in the foot steps of folks like patrice colors who was like a home girl from l.a. who was abused by the lapd. so often, especially since trayvon martin was murdered. the quickly politicalized young people came into leadership of the 21st century black liberation struggle, so often we can criticize them for what they don't know, and what they have done -- and who is starting to culture that. and i think the institutions like highlander and institutions like projects south, the institutions for poverty and genocide, other folks are pushing, i think the movement from "black lives matter" are pushing. >> i think the movement from black lives represents the aspiration of where we want to
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go, not necessarily the challenges of the past. >> and king of course starts the speech by saying that there comes a time when silence is betrayal. the flip side of silence is obviously being vocal, but i worry, mark, and i'm picking up your book here, mark lamont's book. i wonder, though, and -- it troubles me sometimes, mark, that not only are we too silent but the only time we get vocal is when somebody has been shot in the head in the street by a cop. and there is so much more stuff between here and there that we ought to be giving voice to. we ought to be speaking truth to power and the powerless about. talk about this notion of being silent too often and only raising our voices when we have been shot by a cop. >> i think that is the point, we can't just react, there is a question of voices and organizing. part of the problem is we need
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more organized action. and the movement for black lives, the movements that emerged since 2014 and before have modelled a certain kind of practice. so i think that yeah, i don't want us to get shot by the policemen, i want us to be in the streets when there is an unjust shooting, but also to register to vote so george zimmerman doesn't get off. i want us to build citizen review boards and have oversight police boards, i want a system where public defenders are not privatized. where the whole system has become essentially privatized. these are things to do before the e shooting so when the shooting happens we're not just reacting but kind of pulling from a tradition and system that we have installed ourselves. >> and when the organization happened we allow ourselves to have a more full picture of when we're advocating for. it really focused on getting this cop prosecuted which we do a lot, and we're not doing the same thing about the fact that
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the majority of the system is about prosecuting people, not about letting people off. the majority of this is about expanding a prison industrial complex, so when our most visible protests, when our most visible organizing is all about putting people behind bars, not about letting people out, with the uprisings, it has to be about a larger conversation so we can sit inside of that, the conversation around state violence and how people are not held accountable. the ways our communities have been treated because people don't experience issues they experience life. and racism affects people -- from a racist media who has to help fuel the ways in which our criminal justice system operates, corporate power creates unchecked job discrimination. political inequality, economic equality and so forth and so on, so organizing is the way we build a type of power that actually changes all of that and
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focusing on sort of the wackamo kind of uprising of this issue over this issue. it means we need structures that are focused on challenging that energy, not just providing -- >> none of you were born when king gave this speech, i was just a toddler when he gave this speech, yet our generation has to deal with the intersection of race and poverty in a way that is as acute now, even in some ways more acute than it was 50 years ago. >> i think that was real and pulling from what rashad said, for every one of those issues that could be raised whether it's labor or worker justice or talking about islamaphobia or dismantling it, or the lgbt uprisings, especially when we're talking it's so interesting to
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think about brown and ferguson in the context of the conversation, about poverty and white supremacy, because i can tell you every time i was there, fight for 15ers were there, every time i was there the coalition was there, right? that this idea that we must stay in lanes is like the antithesis of what black liberation looks like, you can't talk about islamaphobia and not talk about the large number of people are black people. you can't talk about labor and the numbers. as we from a southern context think about what a 21st century
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movement looks like that gets everybody free, transforms the system so we're not creating problems to impact other communities what we see is definitely an intersectional movement that is led by working class black people. >> i guess the question is whether or not america can handle it which is to say there was a certain ease that america came to although not with this particular beyond vietnam speech, but america was finally getting subtle with accepting king as who he was, they were subtle with his leadership, dr. ashley's point, if this new leadership on all of these issues is in part being led by black people, is america ready for that? >> america is never ready for justice. we have to do it until they get ready. that is why the freedom dream is the starting point. the world couldn't imagine the world without slavery until they had to. black folk led that movement, we
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had to push for that not. push for a world to imagine without prisons, it is easier for people to imagine the end of the world itself than to imagine the end of capitalism and the end of prison and the war, think of the war as ending. we need to articulate a new freedom dream and usher it and make it work through our actions, teaching, religion teachings and personal relationships we can do that. >> and i think that has been the problem, at least the previous couple of decades of movements, of black movements since king is that oftentimes it has been about black faces in high places and what folks are ready for. and i think that if what we're putting on the table is what people are ready for is not the right intervention or the right solution and definitely not visionary enough to actually help move black people in the
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direction we need. >> and i think that is the wrong question because what happens is folks create their own vision, not based on what they deserve. that is hard, we don't get a lot of face to flex like radical revolutionary muscle around what we actually deserve. but there is the southern movement of creating yutopian visions, if if tell you to close your eyes and tell me about a time that you felt safe. what does it smell like, feel like sound like how did it make you feel? i bet you 99% you're not going to tell me it was a cop or a picture of a prison, right? and if you do tell me it was a cop it's probably because it was your uncle, and you felt safe because he was your uncle, not because he was a cop. and if i tell people, what do you need to do to be ready, this quote in the book from dr. harding that was like tell a
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highlander to go right on it. it was our 80th homecoming, anniversary, and he and his widow, the last sentence of the note in the guest book in miles horton's old house said a new america needs to be reborn, let us be the mid-wives. >> harding -- >> to me it's of no concern, my job is to get them there. >> i got 30 seconds to go, what do you make quickly, i wish we all had time to comment on it. i know this so well as we all do. it amazes me how young martin, stokeley, all of those guys were and provided this kind of leadership that america needed. >> it's a reminder we need to reinvest in young folk, instead of looking for the next king, we have to assume that it's in all of our children. >> love you all, thank you for
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doing. that is our show tonight. we want to thank wnet out here in new york for hosting us, thank you for watching this week, if you have not read -- it's friday, so if you haven't read the speech it's five days late. we have been talking about it all week, google it. get a copy of beyond vietnam, and as always keep the faith. >> for more information on today's show visit tavis smiley at pbs.org. >> hi, i'm tavis smiley join me next time as we dive into what is happening around the country, that is next time. we'll see you then.
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