TDS Time Machine | How Not to Celebrate MLK Day
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You're listening to Comedy Central. Since The Daily Show finally hired a black host, we can properly celebrate Martin Luther King Day by asking New Yorkers how they celebrate his legacy. Shut up! Don't interrupt me on Martin Luther King Day. That ain't cool. So, let's do this. Do y'all know what today is? We're lost. We're lost day? Do you know what day it is today?

This is Monday. What you do today? Well, today we just woke up. We just checked out of our hotel. Checked out of our hotel. We're going to go get coffee and we're going to walk around. So which one of those celebrates Martin Luther King Day? Well, none of what we've talked about so far. 232 push-ups for Martin. So this ain't reparations, but this is enough. That's right. Give me one hand once. Yeah! That's right! What y'all doing to celebrate MLK? Came to New York. Came to New York? That's it?

That's all y'all gonna do? Saw some shows, ate some food, did some shopping. All right, I'm gonna come back to y'all on Juneteenth. And y'all better have done better. Don't you like when he, like, you know, refused to move to the back of the bus? Mm-hmm. I can remember snippets through the world news. He didn't refuse. That was Rosa Parks. What is that? Name a famous MLK quote. I have a dream. I have a dream. I have a dream. And what does he say after that?

I'm not sure. Name a famous MLK quote. Besides, I have a dream. Besides, I have a dream. I will pay you $1 million if you can tell me something else that Martin Luther King said. He told his children he loved them. Yes! Millionaire!

- So, ain't nobody saying it. - Lady, you do not know what he said to his children. - Can we Google it? - No! - What the ? - I have a dream that one day, that's all I got. - I have a dream that one day white people will actually know what's in that damn speech. Okay, just name five black people. - Eddie Murphy. - That's the only black person you know? Eddie Murphy? - Byron Leftwich. - Who the is Brian Leftwich? - Byron Leftwich is in the NFL as an offensive player.

Don't nobody know him. You're just making up names now. So how you celebrate Martin Luther King? Um, not too sure. So that's what he died for, man? For you just to be out here just not doing nothing on this day?

Nah, I'm just kidding. You can do whatever you want, man. You black. We're gonna go see the Lion King. Okay. It's got King and the Tiger King as well. I mean, that's as close as you can get. I'll take it. The freedom and liberty to go about and do what we want to do, that's our celebration. See, that's a quote from a black woman right there. That's right. She earned that. Freedom and the liberty to do what we want to do. That's right. I'm just...

- It's your birthday. - It's your birthday. - How old are you? - I'm 50. - What? That's what I'm talking about, black, don't crack. - It's all crack. - You still need lotion though. - For more on Dr. King's legacy, we turn now to Dulcé Sloan, everybody. Dulcé, if Martin Luther King were here, where do you think he would stand on the government shutdown? - I think he would stand inside 'cause it's too damn cold.

Why is Martin Luther King Day the coldest day of the year? I mean, why can't we celebrate him in July? Then we can, you know, march outside and have a cookout. Yeah, but then it wouldn't be on his birthday. Oh. So a black man can't have two birthdays? It's 2019, Trevor. I thought we'd move past this. What? I didn't know there was a civil rights... Anyway, never mind. What? Okay.

While you're indoors today, what do you think and what are you remembering about Dr. King's legacy? You know what I want to remember? The real Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, not the whitewashed Hallmark version. Because every year people talk about the same stuff. The I have a dream speech, the march on Washington, how he had the voice of a Scooby Doo ghost. I have a dream. And I would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for those meddling kids.

But the real Dr. King did not fit in any box. White moderates think he would have been on their side, but he thought they were worse for the civil rights movement than the Klan. And mattress stores are out here having MLK Day sales. But Dr. King was anti-capitalist. And even though he was a reverend and a man of God, he allegedly had a whole bunch of affairs. Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on, hold on. Even if that's true, I mean, that he had affairs, isn't it disrespectful to mention that on his birthday? I don't think so. It's part of his legacy.

A reminder that our heroes aren't perfect, they're people. And I'm not being disrespectful. Just the opposite. MLK was out there getting it. Probably still could. I mean, if he showed up on Bumble, I'd take him to the mountaintop and the valley low. I've never thought of MLK on Bumble. Well, he wouldn't be on Tinder. That man had class. If everyone knew that fighting for civil rights could get you some...

A lot more people would fight for equality, equal pay, voting rights, and whoever can stop black people from getting shot by the police will to not show up, all right? Now, first you get a million in the streets, then you get a million in the sheets. - Dulcé Sloan, everybody! - What is Martin Luther King Day? And how should people celebrate it? Well, for more on this, we turn to a man who has had many dreams that no one wants to hear about, Roy Wood Jr., everybody!

Welcome, boy. Welcome. Good to have you. Good to see you. Good to see you, Mandela. Look, MLK Day is a special day for America, and it's a special day for me as someone who has been mistaken for Martin Luther King Jr. many times. But...

But as we get further and further away from his life, it's easy to forget what he was really about, which means sometimes people celebrate him in a really up way. So today, I'd like to show y'all some of my favorite MLK

like this one. The holiday didn't go as planned for some today. A business in Duluth, Minnesota created controversy when promoting a sale in honor of the civil rights leader. The sign posted at the shop read, "MLK Day Sale 25% off everything black." But the owner says it was just misinterpreted. 25% off everything black? He was black. He was proud. He looked good. We were celebrating that. Are you serious?

For MLK Day, 25% off for black clothes? What it should be is 100% off for black people. Free at last, free at last. Pants, tops, and coats are free at last. Yeah, Roy, you know, what makes it worse is that if you read Dr. King's speeches, you'll see that, like, he was opposed to consumerism and wasteful capitalism. That's right. Celebrating MLK Day with a sale is like commemorating Samuel L. Jackson Day by whispering.

That's not what the man stands for. It's not like in the middle of his mountaintop speech, Dr. King just broke off a line, "Remember me with savings, too insane to be believed. I might not get to that store with you, but my eyes have seen the power of--" Oh, come on, Coretta, let's roll.

You know, it actually is unfortunate, because it seems like some white people are out of touch with Dr. King's legacy. Oh, it's not just a white thing. In fact, Dr. King might actually be proud that on his special day, people of all colors and backgrounds have been up. As we pause to honor Dr. King this year, a flyer for a local event that bears his image is causing quite a stir. But as NBC25's Walter Smith tells us right now, the party is now canceled. The party promoters, nowhere to be found.

This poster has a lot of people shaking their heads in disgust. It shows Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wearing a gold chain promoting a party called Freedom to Twerk. It was supposed to take place at this club, but it's been canceled. The owner says he's disgusted and there'll be no twerking here. There will be no twerking here? Sound like Gandalf in a Tyler Perry movie. There will be twerking! And then, you know, the strippers fly all over the place.

And also, how are you going to Photoshop Dr. King with gold chains to try and make him look cool? He was already cool. Look at these real pictures of Dr. King from back in the day. Look at him playing pool in a suit, in a civil right, fresh from a march. That shot's so cool, it doesn't matter if he misses. And here he is making the library look cool, standing in front of books like they stacks of money.

But this is my favorite Martin Luther King. Wearing sunglasses inside. Trevor, he could have taken that call in private, but he left the door open for the haters.

But maybe, maybe the most popular activity on MLK Day is using his legacy to push your own agenda, and no one has done it in a more interesting fashion than this guy. I believe that Gun Appreciation Day honors the legacy of Dr. King. And the truth is, I think Martin Luther King would agree with me if he were alive today, that if African Americans had been given the right to keep and bear arms from day one of the country's founding...

Perhaps slavery might not have been a chapter in our history. Okay, okay, hold up. I'm pretty sure on Dr. King's list of priorities, giving slaves guns comes way below not having slaves in the first place. The logic, the logic makes no sense.

This makes no sense. How would you do that? Like, do you think the slave owners would have just had a little chit-chat? Well, shit, we set them free. Oh, no, don't set them free. Let's make it interesting. Give them shotguns. Now, I will say this. If slaves did have guns, the movie Roots would have only been 15 minutes long. Your name is Toby...

- Whatever you want us to call you. That's cool, what is it? - Okay, so Roy, we've seen people mess it up, you know, with sales or, you know, with their own agendas, but what is the proper way to celebrate Dr. King's legacy? - Listen, man, it's simple. MLK was for racial equality, economic justice, and stood against the exploitation of the poor.

And he did so because he knew that one day our great nation would rise above bigotry, injustice, and poverty. And on that day, my friends, there will be twerking for everyone, everywhere. Roy Wood Jr., everybody. My guest tonight is an amazing writer at The Atlantic who helped produce a special commemorative issue of the magazine called King, a look at the life and legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. Please welcome Van Uyghur.

Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Man, I've been a fan of your writing for so long. You touch on so many different topics, you know, from Black Panther through to racism in America, the Second Amendment. One of the more interesting conversations that I got started because of your writing was specifically about teachers being armed. And you argued that in...

in its very essence it goes against the second amendment what why would you make that argument yes so it the second amendment is supposed to be this thing that uh... protects people from the government the whole entire ethos of it is you get people you give them guns and you give them guns so they can build a militia but to protect themselves against

tyranny. Right. And so you have teachers who are state agents, right, paid by the state, who are taking care of our kids, who have sometimes done bad things to those kids, and you're giving them guns. So, especially in Florida, you have a guy who was known to use the N-word with his students and was suspended for doing it. You give that guy a gun. For what? Right.

That's a tyrannical government. Yeah. I never thought of that as an idea. I go, like, but, you know, it's one of those ideas where people go, like, this seems like a good idea because everything leads to more guns. You go, like, just give the people more guns, and then it solves the guns. Because if everyone has a gun, then I guess it means no one has a gun. I don't know how it works. Well, I give my gun a gun. Yeah, you give your gun a gun. That's the most important, because guns don't kill people. Right. People kill people. What about guns killing guns? I don't think a gun has ever... A gun has killed a gun. I saw that in a movie once. The gun shot the gun, and the gun... Yeah.

No one talks about gun-on-gun violence. You have an interesting way of looking at the world, and this issue of the Atlantic, I think, looks at Martin Luther King from so many different places and through so many different lenses, which I really found interesting. Martin Luther King is one of those...

figures in america that i've always felt is mythologized and oftentimes misunderstood and it feels like you've captured that in this article why do you think was necessary to have an entire article about martin luther king junior so what we want to do is challenge people you know we want people to read every single article in this issue and come away thinking about something new right something they had never thought about something they never even fathomed about dr king and what that does as a whole

is so many times politicians bring up, or people who have an agenda bring up Dr. King. They quote the dream speech. They do the same thing, okay? He want us to live in a colorblind society where our kids can go to school together. They quote this one part, but they don't quote the part about him being against the Vietnam War. They don't say his speech, his letter from Birmingham jail where he talks about the white moderate and

nobody asks themselves, am I the white moderate? Right. So nobody, everybody now is pro-King and not racist, but nobody's reading King now for how to be anti-racist. It's interesting that you say that because there was a specific article or piece of it that connected with me, written by you in this, and it was...

specifically about the idea of Martin Luther King and his assassination. And you say here, in the official story told to children, King's assassination is the transformational tragedy in a victorious struggle to overcome. But in the true accounting, his assassination was one of a host of reactionary assaults by a country against the revolution. And those assaults were astonishingly successful.

Yeah. That's an interesting point of view, because many people feel like Martin Luther King being assassinated was the beginning of the great journey that got black people to where they needed to be. And you're arguing that it ended a revolution that was starting. How do you prove that, or why do you believe that? So I remember when I was in school, and I had a teacher who told me straight up that the civil rights movement was victorious, that we won, that we won.

And what I could never reconcile was how did we win if Dr. King was assassinated while protesting? How did we win the Civil Rights Movement? How are we victorious if while protesting for higher wages for sanitation workers in Memphis, he was assassinated and his Poor People's Movement was derailed?

I always want to revisit that point. So when I wrote that essay, I was listening to Nina Simone's song, Why the King of Love is Dead. She wrote it three days after he was assassinated. And she's talking about will the country stand or fall

She's talking about a country that seemed then on the verge of an apocalypse. Right. And so I really wanted to go back to that moment and see how we get from that moment where you're talking about the end of the world, the black community in shambles and tears and unrest and riots, and how you go from there to here in 50 years and say we won.

How does it happen? People would say, but Van, look at how much progress black people have made since Martin Luther King. Surely things have gotten better. Black people on the up in America. Well, some studies are showing that that may not be the case. So we've got some studies out from the Economic Policy Institute that are saying that black wealth, black homeownership rates, segregation in schools haven't gone anywhere in 50 years. In 50 years? In 50 years.

So what are we talking about here? We're saying that the gap between blacks and whites now in terms of wealth is just so staggering that it's how do you even build policy to bridge that gap? Education has risen, but our kids are now in schools that are as segregated as they were in 1970. So what are we talking about?

That's an interesting point of view, and I guess I know a lot of people argue back on that, and they'll say, well, I mean, Obama became president, Van, so, I mean, that's progress, isn't it? Yeah, Obama was president eight years, and now will we ever have another black president? Will you ever have another president is the question I ask.

Here's something that I really connected with, and I guess because of South Africa's history, and also because it is International Women's Day, is this beautiful quote in the article. Women have been the backbone of the whole civil rights movement. This popular narrative of the civil rights movement too often relies on great men, the great men version of history. King, Malcolm X, Thurgood Marshall, Stokely Carmichael, other names, you know, and it ignores the importance of women who also organized and led the movement and shows how their contributions

have been sidelined, hidden in plain sight. That is a powerful narrative that many people forget. And that is Coretta Scott King wasn't just a

a sidekick, she wasn't just the woman at home. Why do you think it's so important to acknowledge these women and what were they instrumental in doing in many movements? - Yeah, I learned a lot reading that essay from Jean D. O'Harris. She was talking about Coretta, Coretta Scott King, and how Martin's development politically came from conversation with Coretta.

So a lot of what he was doing was sort of mansplaining Coretta, right? He was going out and saying, "Okay, she was against the Vietnam War years before he was." - Wow. - She, when they were courting each other and when they were

still dating, she was the one who was sort of giving him these economic ideas, passing him along texts about what to read and how to learn and grow. So if you look at Coretta, Coretta Scott King, not just as King's help me, as someone who was an activist in her own right, you start looking at just all these other women in the movement who did so much. Rosa Parks, who was an operative, we're taught in school that she was a tired old lady who sat down.

She was out there, she built the same organizing structures that actually King relied on when he was doing the boycotts. Those were built by black women against sexual assault.

-That's powerful. -The same things. Yeah. And so when you look at these stories, how do you think it plays out? Because Martin Luther King exists in a place where some people use him to stage a protest and others go, "We should use him to sell trucks in America." Um, everyone sees him in a different light. If Martin Luther King were around today, from what you have read and what you've learned, like, how happy do you think he would be? Would he think people have reached a mountaintop?

I think from reading him, his thing was never being satisfied with where we are because there's always space.

in that speech wasn't the place where we need to be in terms of race. The mountaintop was having the vision to see where we needed to go, and I think that vision was that the road is ever, everlasting. - Right. - The moral arc of the universe is always bending towards justice, and we bend it. So I think King would, he would be protesting

Regardless of whatever situation is on the ground right now in America, he will be protesting because that's what he does. That's what an activist does. They were always agitating. And so that's what I want people to take away from the magazine is that his activism was always agitating. It was always moving forward and progressing. And you see in the last year of his life before he was assassinated. Right. He sat down and thought, how do I move this forward? And he came forward with the most ambitious idea.

program to fight poverty, to fight militarism, and to fight racism across the globe. And that was King. That was King. It's an amazing article. Thank you so much for being here. It's an amazing issue of The Atlantic. King.