A LOT OF the debate around black NFL players kneeling to protest police killings and racism seems to take place in a historical vacuum. The history of athletes and protest is seldom mentioned and, what’s worse, the reason why Colin Kaepernick and his comrades began protesting during the national anthem has been drowned out in the shouting. On #MAGA twitter, flooded in recent weeks with angry mobs calling for a boycott of the NFL, various images have been making the rounds depicting Martin Luther King Jr. with his hand over his heart in respect for the American flag. One photo was accompanied by a message saying MLK “didn’t take the knee in protest of the flag or the anthem, he took the knee in prayer to God.” It was followed by the hashtag #BoycottNFL.
Invoking King’s name on the right is nothing new — ahistorical versions of King have been used to defend gun ownership, racial discrimination, and the Republican Party. In this current climate surrounding the NFL protests, King has once again been transformed into a malleable symbol for rampant deployment by people trying to tell protesters and black people today to shut up. One of the biggest problems with all of this is that it is based on complete fiction and total ignorance of who King actually was and what he actually believed. It is also particularly vile when used to try to suppress protest against police killings.
The same pattern applies to Rosa Parks and her civil disobedience against segregation on public buses. It applies to the civil rights movement in general. Caricatures have been created after being sanitized, historically revised, and made palatable for mass consumption and abuse by crass politicians. It is these sanitized versions that are made into statues, given national holidays, and may one day end up on U.S. currency.
An important and groundbreaking new book coming out in January digs deep into this manufactured mythology surrounding King, Parks, and other figures and movements. It is called “A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History.” Its author is Jeanne Theoharis, a distinguished professor of political science at Brooklyn College in New York. Her previous book, “The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks,” won an NAACP image award and other accolades. Theoharis joined us last week on Intercepted. Below is a transcript of the entire, unedited interview.
Jeremy Scahill: Jeanne Theoharis, welcome to Intercepted.
Jeanne Theoharis: Thanks for having me.
JS: Before we get into some of these specific examples, I’m just wondering about your overall view of how key historical figures or moments in the civil rights movement are kind of used or inaccurately portrayed in our current discourse, either by politicians or by ordinary people having arguments online.
JT: I mean I think what we’ve seen, and this has happened over the past number of decades and I would argue since really Reagan changes his position and signs the King holiday, is the kind of creation of a national fable of the civil rights movement.
And so now the civil rights movement is used to make Americans feel good about themselves. You know, from 50th anniversary commemorations of the March on Washington, to the Selma to Montgomery march, from the dedication of King’s statue on the Mall, from the statue of Rosa Parks in Statuary Hall. All of these events have become places where we now celebrate the United States, where we feel so good about the progress we’ve made.
And I think in the process, these kind of dangerous ideas about what the civil rights movement was, what it entailed, how it went forth have become cemented. And so, as you’re implying politicians, citizens, constantly invoke the civil rights movement in the present to justify certain kinds of positions, to chastise contemporary movements; whether it’s Black Lives Matter, whether it’s Colin Kaepernick’s stand that has now turned into a much broader stand by athletes. We’re constantly being bombarded with, “This is not what King would do.” You know, “Be like King, be like Parks,” that strip and utterly distort what the civil rights movement was and what people like King and Parks actually did and stood for.
JS: Well, in fact you had this meme floating around online, of Martin Luther King and one of his advisers, standing hand over heart in front of an American flag and the message there was, “Martin Luther King stood for the American flag, he’s not like Colin Kaepernick or any of these other black athletes that are engaged in this.”
JT: Right and you then we also saw the King Center and Bernice King tweet a couple weeks ago basically how unpopular Martin Luther King was. You know, what it took to be like him.
And then some of the comments, you may have seen this, to Bernice King’s Twitter was literally like, “you’re defacing the memory of Martin Luther King,” and you’re like: do you know who this is? Like, do you understand?
I mean so this idea of what King was and who King was has completely become separated from like what the life of Martin Luther King was like and what particularly his political life from 1955 to his assassination, 1968, actually looked like, and what Americans thought of him at the time.
JS: Right, and we interviewed Tavis Smiley who wrote an excellent book about the last year of King’s life, where King was basically disinvited to everything. He was no longer embraced by the mainstream of the civil rights movement and he was increasingly denouncing US imperialism talking about how “my own government is the greatest purveyor of violence on earth.” It’s the one King quote that I would love to see at an NFL game, when they have all the rockets and the war craft flying over it. Let’s put that Martin Luther King quote up about the US government being the greatest purveyor of violence on earth.
JT: Absolutely, but I think we also need to remember that even the King at the high water mark of 1963, is not popular. So, in Gallup poll, the week before the March on Washington, two-thirds of Americans don’t support the March on Washington. You have Congressman denouncing it as un-American. And in the wake of the March on Washington, the FBI and the Kennedys, this is the moment when you see the escalation of surveillance of Martin Luther King, to kind of wall-to-wall surveillance of him. They call him a demagogue, the most dangerous. Even in this moment, right? We’re not even at ’67 King, with the public speech against the War in Vietnam, we are at King and the March on Washington, and that King is seen as dangerous and that King is surveilled. Right? It’s not just ’67 and ’68 King.
JS: Let’s talk about that King in the earlier 1960s, when the public figure of Martin Luther King became a hotbed issue for all kinds of debate and discussion. What were media outlets and sort of broader liberal society saying about the tactics that Martin Luther King and others in that movement were using?
JT: I mean, again, if you look at polls in the early 60s, most Americans do not agree. They don’t agree with the Freedom Rides, they don’t agree with the sit-ins, they don’t agree that the civil rights movement is the way to go. They don’t believe — again, with the March on Washington, there’s this mob justice. They’re constantly paranoid about violence. They constantly talk about violence, even though there’s no violence.
I’ve been particularly interested, partly because of my own work, which focuses a great deal on the civil rights movement outside of the South, how King is received outside of the south. And if we look at how King, for instance, was received in California in the early 60s, and this is before 1965, Watts Uprising.
King is in and out of LA a number of times in the early 60s, including in 1964. In 1963, after much work and much civil rights activities, you see California pass a fair housing law, and white people go crazy, realtors go crazy. And they get on the ballot, Prop 14 in 1964, on the November ballot which is going to be the presidential election, and basically trying to repeal this law.
And King comes multiple times, right? There’s a massive civil rights campaign in the state to try to keep the law and to vote no on the proposition. And King is repeatedly called a communist, King is picketed, King is denounced for that work in California in 1964. And then we will see, white Californians by a 3:1 margin vote for Prop 14 in 1964, and they sent Lyndon Johnson back to the White House, but they, still, like in my home, I don’t want any fair housing laws. And what King will call this is a vote for ghettos, right? Because that’s what it’s about.
And so, he’s not popular in the north when he’s talking about — I mean, he writes this really beautiful thing that most people have not read in the couple months after Watts, where he’s basically like, “You invite me to your cities, and you sit up there with all this regalia, and you praise the actions of Southern black people, but, you know, when talk turns to condition local conditions, basically it’s polite but firm resistance.”
JS: Right, and I mean and Phil Ochs wrote that great song about this very phenomenon that you’re describing called, “Love Me I’m a Liberal.” And in one of the verses he says: “I love Puerto Ricans and Negroes as long as they don’t move next door.” Also, when King went north into Illinois, you had this famous incident in Cicero, Illinois where you had this white mob come out and they were physically assaulting King and his fellow marchers. And King was then blamed for bringing the violence into the Chicago area. And, in fact, King — you probably know the quote better than I do — but King’s message after that was, “We only unmasked the violence that was there. And we didn’t bring the violence.”
And I feel like there was such an analogue to the times in which we’re living now where black people who rise up to protest against the killing of black people by police are then blamed for any police violence that takes place, whether it’s in Ferguson, Baltimore, or places that we don’t even know about.
JT: Right, right, and I think, again, repeatedly when King starts to talk about conditions, let’s say in New York City, right? After the 1964 Harlem Uprising, King is talking about a civilian complaint review board, he’s talking about needing to reform the police and New Yorkers won’t want anything to do with that.
The biggest civil rights demonstration of the 1960s is not the March on Washington, it is a school boycott that happens in February 1964 here in New York City. After a decade of parents, students, civil rights activists have tried to get the New York City Board of Ed to come up with a comprehensive desegregation plan and they’ve continued to stonewall and say, “We don’t, this is not a problem here.” And we have committee after committee, and so, basically for a decade after Brown, nothing has happened in New York. And so finally, in February of 1964, they decide to have a school boycott. About 460,000 students and teachers stay out of school, so this is almost twice the number of the March on Washington.
A month later, in protest of this, about 15,000 mostly white mothers march over the Brooklyn Bridge in protest of a very modest school desegregation plan that the Board of Ed is floating: 15,000 versus 460,000. Pictures of that march, as my colleague Matt Delmont writes about in his book, end up being played over and over as Congress is debating Civil Rights Act. And one of the less talked about aspects of the Civil Rights Act, one of the things the Civil Rights Act does, is it ties federal money for schools to school desegregation. But northern and western liberal sponsors of the bill write in a loophole for their schools, which is evident the time, Southerners are furious about this, that basically says school desegregation shall not mean, you know, having to change racially imbalanced schools. Because that’s what Northerners call their schools: racially imbalanced schools.
And so, I think, over and over, you see northerners unwilling and angry and furious when sort of the lens comes on their own practices.
JS: Ok, fine, Martin Luther King was an unrepentant radical, I get that. But don’t ruin Rosa Parks for people. She was a tired old seamstress who refused to give up her seat on the bus and it sparked an entire movement because she did that. Right?
JT: Right. Except, no.
So, Rosa Parks has this huge life, what she will call a life history of being rebellious, that really begins in her 20s when she meets and marries the person she describes as, “the first real activist I ever met.” And that’s Raymond Parks. They fall in love. They get married. And Raymond is working on Scottsboro. This is 1931.
Scottsboro is a group of young men, nine young men, ages 12 to 19, get arrested for riding the rails. Basically, they’re riding the train for free. These are young black men. But in the midst of this arrest, police also discover, in a neighboring car two young white women doing this. And that charge quickly changes to rape. These young men are quickly tried and all but the youngest, who is 12, sentenced to death.
And so, this local movement grows in Alabama to try to prevent the execution of these young men. And Raymond Parks as one of the local activists on the ground working on that movement. She meets him, he’s doing that work, they get married in 1932, and she joins him.
By the 1940s, she’s wanting to be more active. She’s galled by the fact that black people are serving overseas in World War II and they can’t register to vote at home. She wants to register to vote. So, she goes to a local NAACP meeting, she’s elected secretary that very first day, she’s the only woman there. And she will spend the next decade with one of Montgomery’s most militant activists, a man by the name of E.D. Nixon, transforming Montgomery’s NAACP into a more activist chapter. Working on issues of voter registration, and issues that we would consider criminal justice. So, two kinds of issues: both the wrongful accusations and convictions of black men and the unresponsiveness of the law to white brutality against black people, in particular, white sexual violence against black women.
So, she spent more than a decade, when we get to that day in 1955, working and trying and over and over and over, and largely they get nowhere. Most of these cases go nowhere. They can’t get convictions or they can’t even get indictments. She manages to get registered to vote because she tries over and over, but most black people in Montgomery don’t and can’t.
Continue to full story/transcript: The Sanitizing of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks
Podcast here: Megaphone: A Modern Podcasting Platform by Panoply
Invoking King’s name on the right is nothing new — ahistorical versions of King have been used to defend gun ownership, racial discrimination, and the Republican Party. In this current climate surrounding the NFL protests, King has once again been transformed into a malleable symbol for rampant deployment by people trying to tell protesters and black people today to shut up. One of the biggest problems with all of this is that it is based on complete fiction and total ignorance of who King actually was and what he actually believed. It is also particularly vile when used to try to suppress protest against police killings.
The same pattern applies to Rosa Parks and her civil disobedience against segregation on public buses. It applies to the civil rights movement in general. Caricatures have been created after being sanitized, historically revised, and made palatable for mass consumption and abuse by crass politicians. It is these sanitized versions that are made into statues, given national holidays, and may one day end up on U.S. currency.
An important and groundbreaking new book coming out in January digs deep into this manufactured mythology surrounding King, Parks, and other figures and movements. It is called “A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History.” Its author is Jeanne Theoharis, a distinguished professor of political science at Brooklyn College in New York. Her previous book, “The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks,” won an NAACP image award and other accolades. Theoharis joined us last week on Intercepted. Below is a transcript of the entire, unedited interview.
Jeremy Scahill: Jeanne Theoharis, welcome to Intercepted.
Jeanne Theoharis: Thanks for having me.
JS: Before we get into some of these specific examples, I’m just wondering about your overall view of how key historical figures or moments in the civil rights movement are kind of used or inaccurately portrayed in our current discourse, either by politicians or by ordinary people having arguments online.
JT: I mean I think what we’ve seen, and this has happened over the past number of decades and I would argue since really Reagan changes his position and signs the King holiday, is the kind of creation of a national fable of the civil rights movement.
And so now the civil rights movement is used to make Americans feel good about themselves. You know, from 50th anniversary commemorations of the March on Washington, to the Selma to Montgomery march, from the dedication of King’s statue on the Mall, from the statue of Rosa Parks in Statuary Hall. All of these events have become places where we now celebrate the United States, where we feel so good about the progress we’ve made.
And I think in the process, these kind of dangerous ideas about what the civil rights movement was, what it entailed, how it went forth have become cemented. And so, as you’re implying politicians, citizens, constantly invoke the civil rights movement in the present to justify certain kinds of positions, to chastise contemporary movements; whether it’s Black Lives Matter, whether it’s Colin Kaepernick’s stand that has now turned into a much broader stand by athletes. We’re constantly being bombarded with, “This is not what King would do.” You know, “Be like King, be like Parks,” that strip and utterly distort what the civil rights movement was and what people like King and Parks actually did and stood for.
JS: Well, in fact you had this meme floating around online, of Martin Luther King and one of his advisers, standing hand over heart in front of an American flag and the message there was, “Martin Luther King stood for the American flag, he’s not like Colin Kaepernick or any of these other black athletes that are engaged in this.”
JT: Right and you then we also saw the King Center and Bernice King tweet a couple weeks ago basically how unpopular Martin Luther King was. You know, what it took to be like him.
And then some of the comments, you may have seen this, to Bernice King’s Twitter was literally like, “you’re defacing the memory of Martin Luther King,” and you’re like: do you know who this is? Like, do you understand?
I mean so this idea of what King was and who King was has completely become separated from like what the life of Martin Luther King was like and what particularly his political life from 1955 to his assassination, 1968, actually looked like, and what Americans thought of him at the time.
JS: Right, and we interviewed Tavis Smiley who wrote an excellent book about the last year of King’s life, where King was basically disinvited to everything. He was no longer embraced by the mainstream of the civil rights movement and he was increasingly denouncing US imperialism talking about how “my own government is the greatest purveyor of violence on earth.” It’s the one King quote that I would love to see at an NFL game, when they have all the rockets and the war craft flying over it. Let’s put that Martin Luther King quote up about the US government being the greatest purveyor of violence on earth.
JT: Absolutely, but I think we also need to remember that even the King at the high water mark of 1963, is not popular. So, in Gallup poll, the week before the March on Washington, two-thirds of Americans don’t support the March on Washington. You have Congressman denouncing it as un-American. And in the wake of the March on Washington, the FBI and the Kennedys, this is the moment when you see the escalation of surveillance of Martin Luther King, to kind of wall-to-wall surveillance of him. They call him a demagogue, the most dangerous. Even in this moment, right? We’re not even at ’67 King, with the public speech against the War in Vietnam, we are at King and the March on Washington, and that King is seen as dangerous and that King is surveilled. Right? It’s not just ’67 and ’68 King.
JS: Let’s talk about that King in the earlier 1960s, when the public figure of Martin Luther King became a hotbed issue for all kinds of debate and discussion. What were media outlets and sort of broader liberal society saying about the tactics that Martin Luther King and others in that movement were using?
JT: I mean, again, if you look at polls in the early 60s, most Americans do not agree. They don’t agree with the Freedom Rides, they don’t agree with the sit-ins, they don’t agree that the civil rights movement is the way to go. They don’t believe — again, with the March on Washington, there’s this mob justice. They’re constantly paranoid about violence. They constantly talk about violence, even though there’s no violence.
I’ve been particularly interested, partly because of my own work, which focuses a great deal on the civil rights movement outside of the South, how King is received outside of the south. And if we look at how King, for instance, was received in California in the early 60s, and this is before 1965, Watts Uprising.
King is in and out of LA a number of times in the early 60s, including in 1964. In 1963, after much work and much civil rights activities, you see California pass a fair housing law, and white people go crazy, realtors go crazy. And they get on the ballot, Prop 14 in 1964, on the November ballot which is going to be the presidential election, and basically trying to repeal this law.
And King comes multiple times, right? There’s a massive civil rights campaign in the state to try to keep the law and to vote no on the proposition. And King is repeatedly called a communist, King is picketed, King is denounced for that work in California in 1964. And then we will see, white Californians by a 3:1 margin vote for Prop 14 in 1964, and they sent Lyndon Johnson back to the White House, but they, still, like in my home, I don’t want any fair housing laws. And what King will call this is a vote for ghettos, right? Because that’s what it’s about.
And so, he’s not popular in the north when he’s talking about — I mean, he writes this really beautiful thing that most people have not read in the couple months after Watts, where he’s basically like, “You invite me to your cities, and you sit up there with all this regalia, and you praise the actions of Southern black people, but, you know, when talk turns to condition local conditions, basically it’s polite but firm resistance.”
JS: Right, and I mean and Phil Ochs wrote that great song about this very phenomenon that you’re describing called, “Love Me I’m a Liberal.” And in one of the verses he says: “I love Puerto Ricans and Negroes as long as they don’t move next door.” Also, when King went north into Illinois, you had this famous incident in Cicero, Illinois where you had this white mob come out and they were physically assaulting King and his fellow marchers. And King was then blamed for bringing the violence into the Chicago area. And, in fact, King — you probably know the quote better than I do — but King’s message after that was, “We only unmasked the violence that was there. And we didn’t bring the violence.”
And I feel like there was such an analogue to the times in which we’re living now where black people who rise up to protest against the killing of black people by police are then blamed for any police violence that takes place, whether it’s in Ferguson, Baltimore, or places that we don’t even know about.
JT: Right, right, and I think, again, repeatedly when King starts to talk about conditions, let’s say in New York City, right? After the 1964 Harlem Uprising, King is talking about a civilian complaint review board, he’s talking about needing to reform the police and New Yorkers won’t want anything to do with that.
The biggest civil rights demonstration of the 1960s is not the March on Washington, it is a school boycott that happens in February 1964 here in New York City. After a decade of parents, students, civil rights activists have tried to get the New York City Board of Ed to come up with a comprehensive desegregation plan and they’ve continued to stonewall and say, “We don’t, this is not a problem here.” And we have committee after committee, and so, basically for a decade after Brown, nothing has happened in New York. And so finally, in February of 1964, they decide to have a school boycott. About 460,000 students and teachers stay out of school, so this is almost twice the number of the March on Washington.
A month later, in protest of this, about 15,000 mostly white mothers march over the Brooklyn Bridge in protest of a very modest school desegregation plan that the Board of Ed is floating: 15,000 versus 460,000. Pictures of that march, as my colleague Matt Delmont writes about in his book, end up being played over and over as Congress is debating Civil Rights Act. And one of the less talked about aspects of the Civil Rights Act, one of the things the Civil Rights Act does, is it ties federal money for schools to school desegregation. But northern and western liberal sponsors of the bill write in a loophole for their schools, which is evident the time, Southerners are furious about this, that basically says school desegregation shall not mean, you know, having to change racially imbalanced schools. Because that’s what Northerners call their schools: racially imbalanced schools.
And so, I think, over and over, you see northerners unwilling and angry and furious when sort of the lens comes on their own practices.
JS: Ok, fine, Martin Luther King was an unrepentant radical, I get that. But don’t ruin Rosa Parks for people. She was a tired old seamstress who refused to give up her seat on the bus and it sparked an entire movement because she did that. Right?
JT: Right. Except, no.
So, Rosa Parks has this huge life, what she will call a life history of being rebellious, that really begins in her 20s when she meets and marries the person she describes as, “the first real activist I ever met.” And that’s Raymond Parks. They fall in love. They get married. And Raymond is working on Scottsboro. This is 1931.
Scottsboro is a group of young men, nine young men, ages 12 to 19, get arrested for riding the rails. Basically, they’re riding the train for free. These are young black men. But in the midst of this arrest, police also discover, in a neighboring car two young white women doing this. And that charge quickly changes to rape. These young men are quickly tried and all but the youngest, who is 12, sentenced to death.
And so, this local movement grows in Alabama to try to prevent the execution of these young men. And Raymond Parks as one of the local activists on the ground working on that movement. She meets him, he’s doing that work, they get married in 1932, and she joins him.
By the 1940s, she’s wanting to be more active. She’s galled by the fact that black people are serving overseas in World War II and they can’t register to vote at home. She wants to register to vote. So, she goes to a local NAACP meeting, she’s elected secretary that very first day, she’s the only woman there. And she will spend the next decade with one of Montgomery’s most militant activists, a man by the name of E.D. Nixon, transforming Montgomery’s NAACP into a more activist chapter. Working on issues of voter registration, and issues that we would consider criminal justice. So, two kinds of issues: both the wrongful accusations and convictions of black men and the unresponsiveness of the law to white brutality against black people, in particular, white sexual violence against black women.
So, she spent more than a decade, when we get to that day in 1955, working and trying and over and over and over, and largely they get nowhere. Most of these cases go nowhere. They can’t get convictions or they can’t even get indictments. She manages to get registered to vote because she tries over and over, but most black people in Montgomery don’t and can’t.
Continue to full story/transcript: The Sanitizing of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks
Podcast here: Megaphone: A Modern Podcasting Platform by Panoply
