 Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Ashley Farmer, Jonathan Aig, and Peniel Joseph. Wow, what a great audience. Good evening, everybody. We're incredibly excited to be here. It's a treat to be able to talk about folks like King and like Malcolm from folks who have really, really delved into the histories and know the insides and outs of it. So we don't have a ton of time and we have a lot to say. So I'm going to hold off and go ahead and dig right in if that's all right with the two of you. Yeah. Okay. So my very first question is a softball question, a very easy one and just is, you know, Jonathan, in the order in the beginning of your intro, you talk about rescuing King from kind of this mythic status, right? Peniel, you talk similarly about this idea that we have of both King and Malcolm as these figures that are ensconced in a narrative of history that few of us get past. So first question is why these books right now and what do you hope that we get from understanding about King and Malcolm that we did not know before? Well, Peniel and I have talked about this a lot. In celebrating these men, we sometimes lose sight of them as men, as human beings. And I wanted to write a book especially for King, I feel like, in creating a national holiday, a monument, a thousand streets, we have watered down his message. We've forgotten about his how deep a religious man he was. We've forgotten how radical a figure he was. And we've forgotten that he was just human, that he had feelings, that he had flaws, that he had failures, that he had doubts and suffered from, you know, anxiety at times. So I wanted to write a book that would restore some of that in the hopes that it would help us connect even more strongly with his message, with his activism. Because when we water down that message, when we take away his teeth, I feel like we take the comfortable version of King and then we end up taking him for granted. Yeah, you know, I think, I hope people can hear me, I think Malcolm and Martin I think are sort of two of the most iconic but also misunderstood figures of the 20th century. They're both these global figures and one of the reasons why I was excited to work on them was being a student of this period and getting deeper knowledge about them, made me think about them differently. And so I agree with everything that Jonathan has said, certainly humanizing them, placing them in historical context, but also showing where they converged. And so, and now with the MLKX series, it's been great because I think that's an introduction to a whole new generation. Because one thing we know as historians is that people forget. And so there's a whole new generation that doesn't really know, they know there's a holiday about King. And with Malcolm, it's actually very interesting because there is no Malcolm X holiday. But he's remained iconic. And I think the series really looks at, and Jonathan's book does too, Coretta Scott King looks at Dr. Betty Chabaz. So it's been interesting. And I think I was focused on them so much because I thought there was so much written about them, but so much little understanding and appreciation of them. So one of the things that I'm hearing from talking to you even in this opening segment is dualities. And by that I mean the King that we kind of revere and the King that you're showing us in this biography, but also the way in which we keep King and Malcolm locked in this duality, right? Pedil has this great line that he often talks about about the civil rights movement being, I'm sorry, the Black Power movement being the civil rights movement's evil twin, right? And to take that a bit further, we would think of it as Malcolm always being King's kind of evil twin in a way, right? So I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about how duality as a theme functions, you know, for your work in King and the biography, and then, you know, what you hope to show us in focusing on King and Malcolm, but maybe moving past this kind of standard understanding of a duality or a binary that we've talked about so far. Yeah, one of the things I love about King is that he's never trapped by those dualities. He's always interested, you know, and he knows that people like Malcolm and Stokely Carmichael are using him at times to create a sense of duality, to create the sense that they're more dangerous because they can position themselves with the media and with their followers as the alternative to King. But King doesn't care about that. In fact, there's this great moment when he's marching through Mississippi with Stokely Carmichael and Stokely in here talking about that very thing. And Stokely says, you know I'm using you, right? And King says, of course, I know. And that's okay. I've been used before. But the interesting thing is that they're actually talking and learning from each other. And King is constantly learning and adapting from people who are criticizing him. He recognizes that that's part of the cost of being the most famous leader, the symbol of the movement. And he accepts that. But he's constantly growing. And one of the things that you see happen on that march through Mississippi is Stokely Carmichael's trying to get him to say black power. And King's like, I'm not going to say it. Because to him it connotes violence. And Stokely Carmichael's almost like, come on, just try it. You'll like it. And King says, I'm not going to say it. But you start to notice in the days and weeks after that, that King begins using black a lot more than negro. And he begins talking about economic power and using the powered power drops into his speeches a lot more. So he's clearly adjusting to the realities and to the people that he learns from. So it's a duality in our minds sometimes. But for King it's all part of a whole cloth, I think. Would you agree? Yeah, I would agree. And I think with King and Malcolm, I think the biggest things that you're trying to get people to learn and understand, it took me some time too to understand this, is Dr. King's, I think conceptually, the biggest contribution is this notion of radical citizenship. And I say radical black citizenship. And black in that context is universal. And King's notion of citizenship is really beyond the civil rights acts and the voting rights acts. He's talking, and Jonathan does this so well in his book, he's talking about guaranteed income, healthcare, the end of violence. So he's asking a lot from all of us. And then conversely, Malcolm is talking about dignity, human dignity. I call it black radical dignity. And what Malcolm means by dignity is that he makes this argument, and he talks to black people and white people and others about this, that we're all born with dignity. And that's one of Malcolm's biggest criticisms of King and the mainstream civil rights movement is that Malcolm perceives of citizenship as just the external recognition of dignity. And so for instance, in 1957, after Little Rock Central High School, King sends Eisenhower a telegram of congratulations after military intervention. And we've all seen the pictures, or we should, of the big mob and then those little children, really, young girls and boys trying to get into that high school. Malcolm sees this as this huge, huge moral violation. Not that they were trying to integrate. And he says it. He's fine with integration. But he's saying, how can we integrate into society when we need armed guards and military intervention to send our children to school, right? Now over time, they both come to see you need dignity and citizenship. And that's what's so interesting about both of them. But I think moving beyond the dualities that we have where we think of Malcolm as his violent man is hugely important. Certainly he talked about self defense, but it's only because of the history that we have in this country. If black people talk about self defense, which we think about Second Amendment rights, it's suddenly retconned, reinterpreted as violent, right? And so King and Malcolm, when we think about that notion of citizenship and dignity, those are North stars to understand them. And when you notice that, wow, they're both interested in citizenship and dignity. By 1964, when Mike Malcolm X is talking to Robert Penn Warren, he's saying, and when he's in Ethiopia and in Dar es Salaam, he's saying, me and King want the same thing. We want human. And sometimes people are saying, well, wow, is he playing games with us? What is he doing? Right? But he's, he's serious, right? It's just that he's saying our methods are different, right? And he even tells at the university college in Ethiopia, he says, King doesn't mind being beaten up and I do. That's what he says. Okay, then. So, you know, folks like us and anybody who's going to go buy these books and read them, right now, understands that, you know, these folks are not so far apart in terms of their political philosophy, but more their means. Or in the case of if we're just talking about Martin Luther King, that it's far more complex. So why are we, and I mean, we as kind of an American society, but also maybe even some extent, we as historians, so invested in these certain narratives of these two men, right? What, what does that feed for us? Or what do we get out of us that we're unwilling to kind of move past it? That's a great question. And I think some of it has to do with the framing and with the media and sometimes with the intentional efforts to divide our, our protesters, our radicals, our civil rights heroes. And it was certainly happening in their time. You know, we have clear evidence that the FBI was intent on disrupting the civil rights movement. We'll get to that. And we'll talk about that. We have clear evidence that the media was trying to pose them as, as opponents, as rivals. And one of the, you know, discoveries that I made, and I remember calling Penelope saying, is this, am I reading this right? That Playboy magazine changed the quote from Martin Luther King when they asked him what he thought about Malcolm X. He said, well, I don't think I have all the answers. We disagree on some things and I, you know, I don't like any calls for violence, but I think we have a lot in common. And they changed that quote so that it ended up reading with his fiery demagogic oratory, Malcolm X is bringing nothing but pain and suffering to the black Americans. And I found that in the transcripts of the original interview that was at the Duke University Library. And while I'm mentioning that, a shout out to the LBJ Library where the team here was enormously helpful to me on my book. I just want to say thank you for that. But my point is simply that a lot of it is intentional that we don't look for the similarities. We look for the, for the conflict because media loves conflict and, and in part also because it was intentional that, you know, our government had an interest in making sure that they didn't focus on the things they had in common. Yeah, I agree with that. And I also think it feeds into this idea of American exceptionalism and the way in which, and by American exceptionalism, all I mean is that we, we have, especially it's even before the post war period, we have a narrative of our country, our nation, as, as a moral and politically good nation that is blessed by God. And within that narrative, we explain inconsistencies or contradictions that have happened in the nation, whether that's against indigenous folks, whether it's against women, African American, Chinese, Asian, Hispanic. We explain these things as aberrations. We say that this is not who we are when we do bad things. And we say that the civil rights acts have shown us how we got it right. And we can get it right. Everything from civil rights acts to Americans with disabilities to different Supreme Court decisions validating gay marriage, for instance. So within that framework, you do need binaries. You do need good and evil. And from that perspective, especially when you think about the way in which their lives unfolded and how they were framed by the media and by the, not just the FBI, but there were multiple different intelligence agencies from the State Department to the CIA, but also statewide, including Mississippi and other sovereignty commissions investigating them. We've sort of have stuck on that framing. I'm working on the year 1963 now, a history. And when you, when you really sort of sort of unpack just even that year, you can see the way in which somebody like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., depending on the media, are looked upon. So I've looked at African American newspapers and journals. I've looked at college and university newspaper and journals. I've looked at beyond things like The New York Times and The Washington Post, just Midwestern and other papers from Arizona to St. Louis to Minneapolis. And I've also looked at the radical and revolutionary journals of the time. And depending on their audience, some audiences really do get them as very complicated figures. The black press thinks of King as a very, very militant figure at times, even before the King of 1965 and 66, right? The left wing press thinks of Malcolm X as a very interesting figure that violence is not the only part of him, right? And sometimes even mainstream magazines look at them and these are like older magazines. Some defunct magazines like Saga magazine and different things like that have very interesting profiles of both of them where you're like, huh, I didn't know this. And I, you know, I get it, right? But in the main, what we did with them, we turned by any means necessary, Malcolm's catchphrase into this war cry. You know, he's just gonna burn it all down, wreck shot. And remember, Malcolm is also positive as some kind of military general, but he never claimed to have all these battalions of troops, except say he represented the black community. So that narrative of American exceptionalism, I think, forces us to within that into the duality that you're talking. And we turn, I have a dream into this great statement of brotherhood and patriotism, when in fact the speech talked about police brutality and reparations and economic inequality. And we just, you know, the media focuses on the part they want to focus on. And I love that you say that because Mary Kempton, who I grew up in New York City, Mary Kempton, the journalist, one of my heroes who used to write for Newsday, but New Republic and New York Post and other places, he says right after the March on Washington that the Republic has never heard anything one tenth, so as radical as Kingsby. That's right. And when you read that, I mean, he's completely right because of what Jonathan is saying. There's so much layered in there. And then we, and that's why I say American exceptionalism, it's beautiful in the sense of it's kind of like the Borg, it takes over everything, right? And so yeah, yeah, the Star Trek, or it's like, I can do, I can do, or it's like Galactus, the world either, you know, Galactus, anybody is interested in Marvel comics. So from that perspective, whatever it sees, it takes. So what we do with the March on Washington, we listen, we listen, we hear the criticism. And at the end, even John F. Kennedy, he hears, I have a dream. And we say, we'll take that. We'll take, we'll take, we'll take, you know, and so that's it. So we take it, we take it. And but the first 16 minutes are real incisive, brilliant criticism and calling us towards this aspirational democracy. And we say, I love the part where you said, I have a dream. So this brings me to, so I had, I was going a different direction, but now we're off to Trekkies. So we're on a different path here. So, you know, the quote that often gets condensed out to the arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice then, right? Does this issue of American exceptionalism and this quote about we're on this kind of long triumphant march towards justice, are they irreconcilable, right? Is, you know, this is, this is King's most, well, I would say besides I have a dream, that's one of his most often kind of sound bites, right? But there's a real question based on what happened to King, what happened to Martin, where we are today, if we're on this kind of inevitable push towards justice, right? Or should we understand that quote to mean something different? Yeah, the problem with that quote, and the problem is we choose these quotes that make us most comfortable. The problem with that quote, the long arc of history, long bends towards justice, is that it sounds as if it's just going to happen on its own. It's like the invisible hand of justice. Don't worry about it. It's going to be fine because, look, it's bending. But what King was not saying, just leave it alone, and it bends, he was saying, we've got to bend that thing. We've got to get out and march and pound away at it. And this is one of the things Harry Belafonte, like, preached to me over and over again, is that we try to take the radicalism out of our heroes, and we don't teach radicalism. We have to water it down to find an acceptable formula. So the arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice. That sounds nice. That sounds great. King had a dream, and it came true, and we don't have to protest anything anymore, right? We find our ways to make these things palatable, and we're doing a huge disservice to history when we do that. And we're doing a disservice to just how dangerous these people were in their lifetime, and how we forget how disliked they were in their lifetimes. Yeah. So speaking of this though, one of the things that I hear coming up over and over through both of your responses is the concept of evolution, right? We have this very static, you know, King is stuck, and I have a dream, right? Malcolm is stuck, and by any means necessary, but what would you describe as the most surprising part of these men's evolution? And that can mean politically, that can mean personally, but what do you hope an audience takes away about our ability to let these people evolve in our minds based on how they evolved as people in their lifetimes? Wow. You want to go first? Yeah, you know, I'd say for Malcolm X and, you know, El Haj Malik El Shabazz is the way in which when you see his transformation and his transition, a lot of those ingredients are there before the final year. So to look at in his totality, but I think what people would be surprised at is what a gentle, sensitive, you know, emotional, intellectual, you know, man he was in person of faith and husband and father, and the way in which he transforms himself from that in that final year from really being Black America's prosecuting attorney to being a prime minister and a state's person who is really traveling to different countries and really listening and learning as much as he's preaching, you know, and I think that would surprise people. And also the moments of real doubt and the moments of real vulnerability that I think in certain ways we don't want, there's a group of people who don't want Malcolm or Martin to have that, right? Because for Black people they've turned into, and you know, we have Frederick Douglass and we have Ida B. Wells and we have so many different important figures, but they've become sort of their own, you know, they're analogous in certain ways to the founders for us. And you know, you've called them and Branch and other people, you know, King, and I think Malcolm is too, whether we want to call it a second or third founding, if the second is the reconstruction and then the third is the second reconstruction. They're so important to us, just like I see now when you think about Malcolm and Martin, why people, there were different groups of folks who they don't want to see Thomas Jefferson torn down or Washington torn down, right? Because they're saying, hey, this person matters, even if they've made mistakes, right? It's just that by not getting into that vulnerability, you lose so much, right? Because the stakes, and one of the things I love about Jonathan's book is that you really get the stakes in terms of that, you know, King is alive in the book. And you know, truthfully, neither of these folks wanted to die, you know? Like nobody, we've turned them into these kind of martyrs, and it's kind of like they're welcoming it at 39, both of them. Neither of them wanted to die. And when you see them as real human beings who at times are like, hey, I don't want to give this speech or do this interview. I don't want to get on that plane. You know what I mean? I don't want to, you know, Malcolm is constantly having FBI folks visit him. And, you know, he has to talk with them. And he's like, I don't want to speak to this agent again, because they're trying to, they're trying to recruit him as an informant. And he's saying no, right? You get a better sense of what they went through and how extraordinary they were. Yeah. And this is one of the things that really resonates in your book, too, is that they have so much in common in the way that they're both sensitive people who are not looking to be public figures in the beginning. And they feel thrust to this. They feel called by their faith. And King is somebody who is really conflicted. He's our greatest protest leader and he hates conflict, really. He begins rooted with his father, but he can't stand up to presidents. He can't stand up to an NAACP. And this is a guy who, you know, as a teenager, twice attempted suicide. And when you think about what compels him, so again, like Malcolm, he's a sensitive, introspective person who feels really called by his faith. And I think to ask your question, what surprised me most, and I feel stupid almost saying this, was just how religious he was and how so much of his courage, his willingness to go on, came from his faith in God and that he felt like God commanded him to do this, that he had no choice. He couldn't turn back. And so many times he had reason to step back, to step aside, to even just take a sabbatical for God's sake. And he couldn't do it. And he grows more and more radical over time, not because I think the radicalism is big, is there all along. But he becomes more pronounced in his radicalism and more willing to express his radicalism and to take on these issues like Northern racism, like materialism, like militarism, the war in Vietnam specifically, because he is further compelled by his faith. And he feels like this is what it's all about. He can't do what's most pragmatic. Even when his advisors, even when radicals like Bayard Rustin are saying, let's just stick to voting rights in the South, King is saying, no, I can't do that. It's not about what's most pragmatic. It's not about what's going to help most with fundraising. It's about doing the right thing. And that's the faith really taking over to the point that the activism becomes secondary. And I think the activism is really outgrowth of the faith. Interesting. And I think that's beautifully said. And this is where, again, this is why I was so inspired to buy both of them. That absolutely happens to Malcolm. That absolutely. And I think that you're completely right, because I think for those of us, and I think Malcolm sort of gets short-shifted in his faith because he's a Muslim. Absolutely. And there's because a lot of the scholars, including myself, who work on Malcolm, are not Muslims. And so you really have to give and respect that faith and to see the epiphany that he has in the Hajj. And one of the interesting things about looking at Malcolm in 64 is that not only does he have the Hajj experience in April, but he comes back to Mecca multiple times during the five-month period that he's there in Africa again from July to November. And he actually gains a teaching certificate to be able to teach Islam to folks in the United States. And he wants to open up an Islamic center in Harlem. And so his faith really is a huge, huge part of him. And he thinks of himself as a Muslim for the last 17 years of his life, even though he was in an iteration that he then comes to see is not what he calls true Islam, but he actually meets people in Saudi Arabia and other people who say, hey, I'm not holding this against you, because this happens to all of us. So there are some, it's so interesting. He becomes, I think, at his best somebody who's very interested in a secular interpretation of it that's expansive enough for everyone, so as not to get into wars, intro, religious wars, and sex and stuff. But it's very similar to what happens again. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So when we're thinking through either faith or politics or how somebody keeps going or how somebody keeps pushing on, none of this is happening in a vacuum. And certainly I mean that the historical things that are going on around them, but I mean the people, their interlocutors, as they were, the ones who have influence over them. So I was surprised in both of your books to see some of the encounters that both figures have with various folks. So I'm wondering if you can answer, it's a two-part question. And part one is, who do you see as surprising interlocutors in either their political or religious faith evolution thinking? And are they all women? Are they all women? Women. That's okay. Well I was going to go with the women first. So I want to talk about that. Yes. Because Credit Scott King is obviously a huge influence throughout his life and she never gets the credit she deserves. Even though she lived along and continued her career as an activist and she was still out in the forefront, we still treated her as if she was just Martin Luther King's wife. And she was his inspiration not just from the beginning but throughout his career. So when they met in Boston and he was at Boston University and she was at the New England Conservatory of Music, King was dating, God knows how many women, but he immediately said you. You're the one I want to marry. And the reason why is not because she was brilliant and beautiful, but because she was an activist. And she had more experience as an activist than he did at that point. In fact, he had none. And that's what attracted him to her and that's what continued to, I think, excite him most about her. And throughout their marriage, even though he was blind to her potential as a leader and was blind to the role that women could have played in the movement and that's a serious weak spot in his career, even though he missed the opportunities to involve her more heavily, he was absolutely influenced every step of the way throughout his career. And let's remember that when Montgomery Bus Boycott begins and their home is bombed and Daddy King and Obadiah Scott show up on the front porch and say, let's go. We're out of here. It's Coretta who says we're not going anywhere. And it's Coretta who attends the first meeting to organize the SCLC because Martin has to leave to go back to to Montgomery when the bombs blow up all over town. And it's Coretta who, when they win, when he wins the Nobel Peace Prize, who says we have a greater responsibility than ever now to look beyond civil rights. And it's Coretta who's speaking out on Vietnam before Martin. So without a doubt, I think the most important influence in his activism. Thank you, Professor. I'll say three people. I mean, I'll start with Dr. Betty Shabazz. I think her role in Russell Rickford's great biography really sheds massive light on this in certain ways. I think it's the best thing I've ever written on her has really been given not so much a short trip, but people talk about the conflict. And some of that is certain biographies and biographers that focused on, you know, obviously there was marital tension, but but you can sort of make that the story. I think Betty Shabazz, who Malcolm Marry's in 1958, but first met in 1956 is really critical to his evolution in so many ways. Because I think he, when you look at him, he's actually more willing to learn when it comes to black women and just gender politics and equality than King in his lifetime. I think Betty, who's a nurse, who's really brilliant and smart, they they are married for seven years. You know, she's pregnant most of those years. And really they have they have end up having six children, but the twins are birthed posthumously. And she's hugely important for him because she's the one who has some skepticism of the nation of Islam and Elijah Muhammad. She's the one who is telling him that in a lot of ways, he is smarter than this to believe in the narrow kind of sectarian world that they have set up. She's the one who's really taking care of the house when he's off and raising their children. And she's the one who really works as a surrogate for him on his behalf when he's out of town and when he's out of the country. So his main interlocutor. And you know, Malcolm will say at times in very sexist ways, but he admits this too when he says, you know, Betty, you know, I love Betty, I trust Betty. He had been traumatized in so many different ways. And he's a product of his time. And then in addition to Betty, I'd say two other black women, one is going to be his sister, Ella May Collins, who, and again, you can look at Ella in multiple ways, because Ella and him when they're in Boston between 1941 and 1946, and in those times he's both in Boston and Harlem. There are times they participate in the underground economy. And sometimes people will say, well, Ella, you know, led him astray. She's terrible and all this stuff. It's very, very complicated. There's a lot of black people. I'm from New York City, both in the post war period, all the way up until today, who are intelligent, are intellects, but don't have a way of gaining access to the mainstream in quotes, legitimate economy. Right. And so they find other means, right? They find other means to survive. So that's what Ella, and so they have a very complicated relationship, but a very loving relationship. And Ella is part of the Nation of Islam. She gets out of the Nation of Islam. She's the one who finances his first trip to Africa. She does so many different things and becomes a huge advisor for him. And then the final person, which a lot of people could be surprised about is Maya Angelou. And Maya Angelou, the very brilliant poet and writer and memoirist was one of Malcolm's really good friends, had worked for Dr. King at a point. But Maya Angelou, they reconnect in Ghana and they had known each other in New York City too, but she becomes part of the OAAU, Organization of Afro-American Unity in Ghana. And they write each other letters. They have a great epistolary relationship. And they're constantly going back and forth about the role of artists and intellectuals and how part of this is a cultural revolution that's needed to transform the community. So then given what you've just told us, I still find it hard as someone that teaches and writes about Black history to think of us sitting up here in the same context and having two massive, wonderfully written, but massive biographies or biographies in which we might understand the duality between two Black women in the same way. Why is it, do you think, that we're not able to give Black women the same kind of treatment, right? That we are able to give King and Malcolm, especially in this day and age? I think there's a number of different reasons, but I think one, historians have. So you think about historians and Paula Giddings on Ida B. Wells. You think about Tamiko Brown-Nagin on Constance Baker-Motley. There's a number of different really brilliant biographies and you've done a group biography on Black power activists and Black power women. I'd say, for instance, Angela Davis and the biography that Keonga is working on, I'm sure that's going to get massive, massive attention. So I think on some ways the corner is turning on being able to get that attention for Black women and Black women's biographies. But I would say that in the 20th century, part of, and we show it in the series MLKX, and you showed in your book, like Coretta Scott King didn't go to the White House after the March on Washington, which is now like stunning, right? And she wants to go and he's saying, hey, wives aren't invited and the wives weren't invited. So it's not that Coretta didn't go, but Roy Wilkins' wife is there and other people's wives there. Nobody is there, right? And this is just 61 years ago in August. It's just going to be 61 years ago. So part of it is just there are going to be women of that caliber, Ella Baker and the great Barbara Ransby biography of her. And Ella Baker is actually in MLKX and Byrd is in there too. But I agree. I think that it's a lacuna not having that. And if we get one, we get one, right? We get biographies. Not multiple. But when we're talking about why the two of you are able to write books about men whose lives have been well traveled, it's because you offer us different vantage points through which to understand these men, right? So we might wonder why then we are not offered the same thing amongst Black women. In part because there's a record of the men and that makes it easier for us. So we're picking the easier stories, right? It's harder as you're discovering to write a book about somebody whose life was not as well documented because they weren't getting the credit at the time that they were doing the work. And we still haven't had a credit Scott King biography. We desperately need one. And there is a record for her. There are FBI records. There are letters. So we need to see that soon too. Yes. So what I hear you all saying is that if all these good people will go out and buy books about Black women as biographers, then maybe also we'd jump up some interest to offer, you know, more than one biography of Angela Davis, right? Or more than one biography of Ella Baker. No, absolutely. You remember Netflix recently had a which I actually watched, which which I enjoyed was a Madame CJ Walker series, right? A couple of years ago and that people were criticizing but just the fact that it was it was allowed to happen. So part of this is I agree like having the source material, having the books that are popularized enough where, you know, Hollywood and different people are going to say, Hey, there's a real audience for this is usually important. Yeah. So you brought up about FBI being a key source of even Black women's organizing and as somebody who has written extensively about the 60s, I can attest to that. So what we do know typically as a as a general population is the ways in which King was hounded. If anybody knows anything, it's probably the suicide letter, the famous suicide letter, right? I don't think it's news to anybody of the ways in which Hoover hounded Malcolm X. But I want to turn our attention a little bit to this surveillance, right? I'd like for you to offer maybe our audience something that is genuinely surprising about what you learned about their surveillance, given that this topic of government surveillance was so well worn with these two folks. Well, in my case, there were thousands of pages of new FBI transcripts that were released just in the last four or five years. Many of them I think accidentally released by President Trump, which is my favorite act of his administration. And the irony is that it has the dual effect of showing us just how insidious the surveillance was, just how involved other members of the FBI and the administration where it wasn't just J. Edgar Hoover. And one of the things we learned from the LBJ library is just how well aware LBJ was of the surveillance and how at times members of his administration were encouraging the FBI to leak this to the media. So this was not just the rogue FBI director. This was the US government, capital US and G. It was widespread. And the media was well aware. And we often give the media credit for not reporting on King's sex life, but they also failed to report on the government surveillance of King, which would have been the bigger and better story. So there's a bigger story there and it's wider. And we need to understand that it was there was huge complicity across the board. But the other aspect of this that really surprised me was just how it has the unintended consequence of humanizing King, because we can read his private phone calls. We can read his words and these are his words. We know the FBI transcripts are accurate because people like Andy Young and Byrston who have read the transcript say that's what we said on the phone. So there's a good reason to be skeptical of the FBI memos about King, but the transcripts are reliable. And we can hear just how difficult the last years of his life were, in part because of this surveillance, because his work is getting harder, because the media is coming down on him for things that he can't understand why they're treating him so badly. And we can see and read in these transcripts just how sad and lonely and frustrated he was that his work was so difficult. And it has the really powerful and profound effect of giving us this window into his life. And it's kind of the opposite of what the FBI intended to do. But there's this one phone call after his speech on April 4, 1967, exactly a year before his assassination, Riverside Church, the Beyond Vietnam speech, which is really one of his greatest and most radical speeches in which he sums up his philosophy and talks about why he can't limit himself to civil rights, why he has to speak out on these greater moral issues of materialism, militarism. And the day after this speech, the New York Times, the Washington Post, they all bash it. And he's on the phone with one of his closest friends and advisors, Stan Levison. And Levison says, and Levison started out more radical than King. And he says, I didn't like that speech. It didn't sound like you. And it's going to really set us back in our fundraising. It's going to damage our relationship even further with the president. And it's going to just make all of our work harder. And King has to say to one of his closest friends, basically, you know, don't you know who I am? What I said may have been politically unwise, but it was not morally unwise. And we know this because the FBI was listening to the call. And Levison might have been upset because Vincent Harding did that speech. Yeah, Vincent Harding wrote that speech. He didn't do that speech. Right. You know, I would say it's Malcolm in Africa and the way in which the State Department at the CIA and getting access to some of that stuff and seeing how, you know, just it really humanizes coupled with the fact that we have his diary now, but his travel diary, but it really humanizes because the you see how fearful American embassies were over Malcolm talking about racism in the United States in Africa and Malcolm saying that the civil rights movement needs to be internationalized and going to Cairo, the Organization of African Unity Conference, and trying to get a resolution passed decrying American racism, right. He eventually actually gets a resolution in Kenya, in Kenya. And it's just very interesting. There are times, you know, William Atwood is the US ambassador to Kenya. And there's a great scene where Malcolm is at a city hall ball in Kenya. And he's been invited by Tom Maboya and Patricia Maboya. And Tom Maboya is one of the big leaders of Kenya who was killed in 69 Revolutionary Kenya. And someone is one of the ministers is dancing with the American ambassador's wife. And another minister interrupts the dance to introduce Malcolm X, right. And, you know, Atwood is aghast by this violation of protocol. And, you know, he's writing this up and everything. But a couple of days later, you know, Malcolm is speaking to the Kenyan parliament and talking about racism and the whole thing. And they release a resolution saying, hey, we're 100% with this. So exactly what the CIA feared. Did fear, right. But what's so extraordinary is that so the state, you know, the American embassy is going crazy. They're contacting all these people. And Malcolm that afternoon, he walks into the embassy and says, hey, I want to speak to Atwood. And he actually gets to speak to him. I mean, it's really extraordinary. And it's extraordinary when you read the stuff because the files, because people are saying, hey, he's he's really intelligent. His appearance was really neat. You know, he's he's he's hugely eloquent and persuasive. You know, I mean, this is so interesting. But then they're saying, you know, he's basically twisting our image in, you know, in the world, right. And he's having this back and forth with them where he's telling them, look, I think that there are some sincere elements in the government, but there's a lot of insincere elements. But what's so interesting, he's telling them because he knows people are trying to say he's violating the Logan Act and send him to jail. Right. And he's saying, look, and this is really interesting, I think, where he's telling these folks, these, you know, the foreign service officers, the council, Atwood, that I'm not anti-American. I'm not anti-American. He's saying, I'm here because my religion, and this goes back to King, mandates that I speak the truth, that I speak truth to power, but I'm not anti-American. And in fact, and this is where he's super funny. He says, I'm doing you all a favor because I'm bringing you closer to the words that you always express that are unmatched by deeds. He's just trying to help everybody out. Just trying to help everybody out. And King says the same thing. King says, I'm helping you fight off communism. I'm not a communist. Like if we will maybe be the envy of the world, if we become more democratic and more just society, right? How can you call me a communist? It's awesome. That's what I'm saying. Okay. So speaking of this question, so we've got a few more minutes and I'm going to try to fit into questions if I can. There's so much more to talk about, but I know we're running out of time. So because we are being sponsored by and in the majesty of the LBJ Library, I'd love for you to talk a little bit about each of these men's relationships to the office of the presidency, right? So we can certainly talk about LBJ, but how did they understand the seat of power? You talked very early on about the conflict between Daddy King and King and how that might have played out in situations of power with the executive branch. So can we speak briefly to the presidency and these men? Yeah, you know, Reverend Bernard Lafayette, when I talked to him called King, the greatest crowbar America ever made, and I think that what he meant was that King saw his role as being prying, especially on the presidents, especially on the law, that he had more power than anyone else to pry those people in power because obviously they didn't have power. And King's whole idea was that we have to use our protests. We have to protest non-violently. So we gain the moral power because we don't have the physical power. We don't have the votes. And I think that Bernard Reverend Lafayette is absolutely right. But the problem with King's relationship with these men was that he could never really think like a politician. He understood that his job was to pry, but I think he was constantly speaking different language and didn't understand why they weren't behaving more morally. And it's clear with Kennedy, he talks about it all the time, why isn't he delivering the civil rights legislation that he promised when he was running for office? Why is he more worried about losing votes in the South? And then with LBJ, it's the same kind of thing. This relationship starts off incredibly well, and I think they have trouble speaking the same language at times. This is a great moment and you can hear it on the presidential website, on the tapes from the Oval Office where King is in Los Angeles after the uprising in Watts and during the uprising in Watts. And he's reporting to Johnson on what he's seeing there. And it's this fabulous conversation because King basically says, you don't understand how deeply rooted the anger toward the police is. You don't understand how deeply rooted the economic issues are here. The job, the difficulty finding fair employment, housing. And he's basically walking him through all the things that are at the root of the uprising in Watts. And it's this fabulous conversation. But you get the feeling that they don't really understand each other, that King is coming at this from a moral perspective and Johnson is coming at it from a political perspective. And as I'm listening to this, I keep wishing that King would just say, by the way, while I'm out here doing this work, it would be really great if you get the FBI off my back. And I think actually, I think the president might have respected that because that's speaking his language. And I think that there was this constant disconnection between them. And I think that it's the greatest relationship we've ever had between an activist and a president, maybe Douglas and Lincoln. And yet it's so fraught and it's so challenging for both of them, I think. Yeah. And Malcolm has a star-crossed relationship with American presidents, certainly with Kennedy and LBJ. With Kennedy, before the assassination and before the chickens coming home to Roos, he really is critical of Kennedy in the context of Birmingham. And it's a very interesting relationship because in 63, when you just really let that year unfold really daily, Malcolm's in Washington, D.C. for much of that year as heading Muslim mass number four. And he's holding press conferences in the House of Representatives. He's doing a whole lot. And there's a point where the president mentions him. Kennedy actually mentions him to reporters. They were having this TFX controversy. And he says, well, we've had the TFX controversy for months and now his brother Malcolm is coming to Washington, D.C. for the next six months. And we have some great transcripts, too, from the Miller Center, where they're talking about Malcolm X and they're talking about Baldwin and other places. Malcolm really is very critical of JFK as somebody who he feels only intervenes in Birmingham after there's a black rebellion in Birmingham Mother's Day after the bombing. And that gets a lot of traction because he's so critical of the president saying things like Kennedy's wrong because his motivation is wrong, right? Certainly after the president's assassination, Malcolm on December 1st is answering questions about how he feels about the assassination. And he says that you all want me to say, hooray, hooray, I'm glad he got it. And I don't feel that way. But he says that the assassination, he's an old farm boy. And as an old farm boy, he feels the assassination was an example of chickens coming home to roost and chickens coming home to roost never made him sad. They made him glad. And so here's what he means by that. And he actually has to tell Atwood, Atwood asked him a year later. What did you mean by that? He means that it's not that he's happy that Kennedy was assassinated or that Kennedy deserved to be assassinated. Malcolm is making an argument similar to King that America's foreign policy and domestic policy foments so much violence in the world that there's unintended consequences with the violence it's fomenting. But he's also very upset about the violence that is directed against black people in the United States, right? Violence that seems always to be, there's no justice for that violence. And it continues unabated, right? And in this dovetails, the last thing is LBJ. He's going to be so, most of LBJ's presidency, Malcolm, is out of the country in Africa. But he's so hard on LBJ and Goldwater that people and some, even some of his biographers do this because it's a mistake. But they make a claim that he endorses Barry Goldwater. He does not. He absolutely does not endorse Barry Goldwater. He says that the political system is so corrupt that you're forced into a lesser of two evils. But what he says about Goldwater is that he calls Goldwater, and Malcolm is constantly speaking in analogies and metaphors and all this stuff and little stories. He says Goldwater is a wolf, right? For the black people. He says that LBJ is a fox, right? And he says it's a choice between a fox and a wolf, but the wolf, you know what you're getting. That's what he's saying. But it's not an endorsement, but people somehow take that to be an endorsement, right? And even to this day, people will say Malcolm X endorsed Barry Goldwater for president. 100% untrue. But when you look at the way the media unfolds at the time, not only did they, including the New York Times, say this, and even black reporters like Louis Lomax, and it's people say Louis, but he called himself Louis, Louis Lomax. They start to call Barry Goldwater Barry X. They say Malcolm X and Barry X, right? So that's the framing, Ashley, that you were talking about before, because it makes sense to them. They say, okay, so King is with LBJ, and Malcolm X is with Barry Goldwater, aka Barry X. Yeah, I got it. Okay. If I can have one more last final question. Okay, great. So we are living in somewhat difficult and dark times. Yes, we have presidential elections on the horizon. I think that there's certainly a sense of uncertainty of how things are going to play out over the next year. When you write these histories, and when we flock to these histories, it's because hopefully we're giving some sort of hope, right? Something to hold on to that says, I know how to navigate and understand the world as I see it now, and I have some hope for tomorrow, right? So what would you say in kind of your parting words that we want us to take from your books as kind of the thing of hope to hold on to, either something you found yourself or something in writing it you hope people take away from it? Well, for me, I feel like, and I think we can all agree, that history is something that threads through our lives. It's not the dates on the calendar. It's not flipping the pages back. It's running through our lives. We are living with history, and we need to pay attention to it to understand it and to appreciate how it's running through our lives and how it affects us. And I think when I think about King, and one of the reasons I felt like it was important to write another King biography and that we need a new King biography and a new Malcolm X biography and new Coretta Scott King biography and others every generation or so is because our lives are different and they mean different things and they speak to us in different ways. But they only speak to us if we actually listen and if we hear their words again. And what I think, you know, boy's me when I think about the King story is that it does feel hopeless sometimes. It does feel like we can't change the world anymore, that these forces are beyond our control. But what must it have felt like for Dr. King? It must have felt so much more difficult, so much more impossible. You know, he was living in a time when the laws were still stacked against him and black people in general. And at a time when his popularity was fading, his own government was investigating him, his funding was drying up. The last years of his life, he was telling his friends that he felt like no one was listening to him anymore. And yet there he was in Memphis. And again, against the advice of his advisors because they said, that's a local issue, we don't need you, they don't need you there. He's trying to plan the Poor People's Campaign, the biggest, most ambitious campaign of his career. And it's not going well at all. He's having trouble recruiting. And yet he still believes. And he's still saying that, and this is one of his last quotes, he said, we must stay awake, we must adapt to change, and we must never lose infinite hope. So I feel like if he could say that after all he'd been through, his home was bombed three times, he stabbed in the chest, his own government is actively seeking to destroy him. If he could maintain hope, then we have to too. And that means remembering that the arc of justice doesn't bend on its own, we have to bend it. Nudge it, guys, nudge it. Oh, go ahead. Yeah, the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. I think with Malcolm, and I'd say Ann King, what I get hope in is this idea of dignity and citizenship. And so I think that, and I think whether people are Black Lives Matter or immigrants or queer groups or unions, those two themes are hugely, hugely important. So with Malcolm, this idea that either everyone counts or none of us count, which is a really, really important idea, especially in the world and the world we're living in right now. And then with King, this idea that all of our innate dignity needs to be recognized globally as citizenship, right? So King doesn't believe in negative borders and walls, right? So I think that gives us a lot of, lot of hope because I think the reason why these two continue to resonate is because people keep finding new generations, because I'm a generation extra. I remember when Spike Lee's Malcolm X came out in 1992. And new generations, it's so interesting. Malcolm got a stamp in 1995. By 1999, there's the stamp, there's so many different iterations of people coming and finding out a new thing about Malcolm X and new interests. Same thing with King, although King has been more state-sponsored than Malcolm X. So there's no statue of Malcolm X in Washington DC. There's no statue. But it's interesting that just from the grassroots and globally, there are billboards and posters and murals of both of them around the world, right? So I have hope in those themes of dignity and citizenship, which I think are really timeless and continue to resonate. There's a reason why we look to them as part of a founding group of Americans that I agree are much more global and diverse and include women and queer folks and just so many different folks. But the reason we keep coming back to them is because their ideas were so resonant. Because I think people whose ideas are not resonant, there becomes a point where generation, and we need the Jonathan Igs, the Ashley Farmers, a generation doesn't look them up anymore. The reason why these folks continue to be resonant, I think, is because they gave us something like Prometheus, Promethean fire. They gave us this thing that stays evergreen and each new generation is trying to figure it out. Despite their flaws, despite all their flaws to say, what they said here is really resonant, including the arc of the moral universe. But remember, King also says things like, now is the time to make real the promise of democracy. And Malcolm is saying that the civil rights struggle should be a human rights struggle. And what we don't know about Malcolm, little tidbit, Malcolm X had an office at the United Nations for years because he had access because of African delegates at the UN, loved him since the 1950s. So he would saunter into the UN with a briefcase. That's why all the interviewers keep saying, Malcolm looks like a lawyer. He looks like he's a professor. He looks like a businessman. So what I'm hearing you say is that there's value in all of these kind of tidbits and sound bites that we have, but we've got to expand our understanding of them and dig a little deeper to see how we find meaning today. Absolutely. And mostly we've got to bend that arc, y'all. Yes? All right, can you join me in thanking these wonderful guys? Thank you, Ashley. Thank you.