 So, I'd like to introduce our current speaker this morning. During his 22 years as an educator, Maurice Dolberry has been a teacher, a coach, an educator in grades pre-K through 20. He currently runs Align in the Sand, LLC, which is an educational and research service, and coaches high school wrestling in Seattle. He's originally from Ypsilanti, Michigan. Maurice is a hip-hop head, a sci-fi fan, and a longtime dog owner. He earned his Bachelor of Science in Biology from Howard University, HBCU, Washington, D.C. A message in education from Florida Atlantic University and a Ph.D. in education from the University of Washington. Maurice, as a side note, we met as graduate students in the University of Washington, Dr. Dolberry is someone who I highly look up to. He's a friend. I consider him just off the charts genius in so many different ways, and so I hope that you're able to take a lot from this talk. In addition, he taught in the Emoja Black Scholars Program, and so just real quick, if you're interested, talk to Crystal Welch. He also taught African American Experience, which you can currently take through our American Ethnic Identity Studies, which is Dr. Eric Elwin in the back. He currently teaches the class right now. If those programming classes sound interesting and those are the two people you can connect with, so without taking any additional time, please welcome Dr. Maurice Dolberry. Whenever somebody introduces you, and your point introduces you to this, oh, he's like, man, I don't really do all that stuff, and I got to live up to what he just said. Appreciate the introduction, and thanks for having me here this morning. I was listening to, because I do have some music playing when I walked in, and I was listening to some music on the way over here, and so I had one of my former students here. I know they turned it up because I wasn't talking loud enough, but if you've ever had a conversation with me, been around me, you'll learn that I am a discursive speaker and a circuitous storyteller, as my advisor told me, and I speak in epicyclic ways. All of those things are aspects of being an African-American, circuitous storyteller, meaning the stories that I consistently tell, the narratives that I give are circular in nature. So I start talking about something, and they're like, what in the world? Why did we start talking about, oh, I get it, that's why. And then it's epicyclic, so I'll be talking about something, and then go back to something, and then move forward, and then go back to something again, and then move forward, and go back to something again, right? And it's discursive, it's wander, but I promise you, at the end of about, I don't know, 50 minutes, 55 minutes, depending upon what your attention span is like, we're going to all be at a specific and a certain place. But I was listening to a song this morning, and I'm at the point now where, you know, I'm that dude who's like, y'all don't know about, but Max Romeo's song starts out, Lucifer, son of the morning, I'm going to chase you out of earth. Nobody? OK, wait a minute. Everybody's looking at me like, I'm crazy. Jay-Z used it in a sample. Anybody play Grand Theft Auto? Y'all don't remember, that was one of the tracks you're driving along. Like, oh, that's where I heard that song before. But I was listening to that song, and the lyrics, right? He starts out, Lucifer, son of the morning, I'm going to chase, and this is my Jamaican accent, right? I'm going to chase you out of earth. And I was thinking about the history of Max Romeo, right? A guy who's a reggae artist, and he's from Jamaica. And the song, and there's this one part, there's this one part in the song, and oh, do this, get your smartphone, your tablet, your laptop, whatever, get that out, take that out. I'm going to be talking about stuff. I'm going to be looking at my smartphone, and hell, if it gets boring, you can do something else, go to Facebook, right? Entertain yourself. If it's boring, I'm going to do that, right? But I'll bring up some things as we go along, and please do look down, feel free, like, you know, add these pieces in. I like words, so I might use some words that you're unfamiliar with. Look those things up, but at one point in the song, and I want to make sure I get the lyrics right here when he says, so when I check in my last in on, and if him slip, I gone with his on. So he's saying, my last in hand, right, my cutlass, my sword, right? He's talking about the devil. He's going to send the devil, literally, he's going to send the devil to outer space, right, to go mess with another race, right? He was starting to talk about a reggae song, you're like, but I'm here for Martin Luther King, too. But he says, look, you know, I'm going to check the devil. I got my sword, I got my cutlass, and if the devil comes checking me, the devil comes putting his hand on me, I'm leaving with his hand, right? I got to leave with his on, right? And so thinking about this is how I think, right? And so this is how I am describing what do these things mean to be a circuitous storyteller as an African-American person, to speak in epicycles, to think. So I was like, man, the understanding and the history of being African in this hemisphere is one that is couched in violence. As my fellow peer from Howard University, Ta-Nehisi Coates talks about, right, that this history of plunder and black bodies not only being sites of plunder and violence, but literally ourselves being the plunder, right? So, you know, pirates and treasure, right, and plunder as in, we're stuff, right? And the reduction in humanity and what that means for being black in this hemisphere, right? And so my thesis statement for you, right? Because some of you are looking like, I don't know who Max Romeo is, why are we talking about reggae lyrics? Here's my thesis. And challenge, I want this to be interactive. There are going to be times we're going to stop as we're going along. For Martin Luther King to engage as a scholar and to engage as an activist and to purposefully be nonviolent in this hemisphere, considering we got to chase the devil out of earth, right, is as revolutionary an act as a black person could engage in, considering the history and the context in which blackness sits in this hemisphere, right? So violence is normal, violence is regular. It is ingrained in the existence of this history. I read so the United States, I think since its formal existence, the United States has had, I believe, 16 years during which it has not been either at war or had its military occupying another place and engaging in acts of violence, right? How was the United States, 1776, 2020, what is it? How was the United States on July 4th this year? 200 and so some of y'all in here got some quick math skills, quick maths. What is it? 243 years the United States has spent about 16 of them not engaging in war and violence, right? So yeah, that's my thesis. My thesis is that Martin Luther King was a revolutionary because he engaged in nonviolence. And I'm going to really challenge you this morning to consider the conception of nonviolence and challenge the idea of nonviolence as acquiescence, right? As giving up, as giving in, as accepting. Oh, so Martin Luther King was born in 1929. That's what we're supposed to start, right, sorry. Because this is a lecture about Martin Luther King. Martin Luther King was born in 1929. Kojo Lewis died in 1935. So that's the first one. I want you to look that up. It is, I think it's K-U-D-J-O-E. So check it out. Take your smartphone out, your laptop. If you're sitting next to someone, if you're the type of person you don't want to use your smartphone, take a second. Turn to the person who is next to you and your vicinity. Everybody in here without me telling you, because I told you, let's do a little learning this morning. Who is Kojo Lewis? Anybody know who he was? If you don't, look it up right now. Here, let me give you a second. Yeah, K-U-D-J-O-E Lewis. And I gave you the context. Martin Luther King was born in 1929. Kojo Lewis died in 1935. Who was he? Make sure everybody around you, the people who are around you, don't that are not using their technology. And understand, I want to support that as well. Who was he? Just share with each other. Start talking. I don't have to be the only one talking this morning. Share who he was. So, and look, y'all can't get away from us. Howard University folks. We're everywhere, right? I brought up Ta-Nehisi Coates, right? You're familiar with Ta-Nehisi Coates? Got a new book, Water Dancer, Between the World and Me, MacArthur Genius. That's how we do it. Zora Neale Hurston, another Howard University alum, Zora Neale Hurston wrote about Kojo Lewis. So now, understanding who he was and just that basic understanding of who he was, understand, if he had been Martin Luther King's grandfather, he would have spent time sitting at the knee of a man who experienced the middle passage, right? One of the things that we consistently hear as we push back against social justice movements, and in particular, anti-blackness and social justice movements, slavery was so long ago, right? Slavery was so long ago. And I know if you're here listening to me, this is an example of so-called preaching to the choir, right? You understand, at least to a significant degree, that no, it wasn't, right? So again, if that was his grandfather, he would have sat at his grandfather's knee and could have learned about him being chained to the bottom of a ship that took him from the western coast of Africa to the United States to experience this imminent violence, the same sort of violence that caused Max Romeo to write a song talking about Lucifer, son of the morning, I'm going to chase you out of earth. The willingness to pull out the sword and cut off his hand. The legacy of people like Nat Turner, who engaged in and uprising, who engaged in an insurrection and engaged in acts of violence, as acts of freedom and acts of revolution, right? The normalization of the plunder of black bodies and black folks is something that is so ingrained that a Martin Luther King who was born, Michael Lewis King, right, in 1929 and matriculated and moved through his life to actually engage in non-violence, again, to go back. Now, I think you're starting to get it now, to go back to my thesis. That's an act of revolution, right? It makes him a radical and a revolutionary. To be clear, I'm not telling you that to engage in acts of violence is something then that is wrong. I think, look, there's reasons for violence. Aaron mentioned that I'm a wrestling coach. There are times for violence. I mean, look, there are people who deserve to be pushed into traffic. I ain't even gonna lie to you, right? There's times when folks, I am not someone who is against violence, right? But again, as we start to reframe and understand the context in which Martin Luther King's life sits, we have to understand non-violence then as still an act that is revolutionary, couched as a black man, an African-American man, born to a significant amount of privilege, born to a significant amount of privilege. Dr. King was bad and bougie, right? He was born in, okay, pleat, Migos? I know you don't mind not have heard of Max Romeo and heard Lucifer by Jay-Z. It was on the black album. Bad and bougie, Migos, you heard that song? Okay, so, yeah, great, so, and I'm on camera like, yeah, yeah, he said Dr. King was bad and bougie. Well, good morning. Dr. King was born into a significant amount of privilege. He was born into a very financially stable home. He was born into the so-called nuclear family in the United States, a mom and a dad, in a so-called loving home, right? He's the son and grandson and great-grandson of a Baptist preacher, right? And I'm gonna come back to that, put a pin in that for a second, because one of the things that we understand about Martin Luther King is his push against capitalism as well, which again is an act of revolution, right? In this hemisphere where capitalism is the precedent where the initial capital that funded and continues to fund to this day, the hemisphere was black bodies. That's the capital upon which this entire hemisphere sits currently, right? So then to be against and to challenge, not to necessarily be against, but to challenge capitalism again is an act of revolution, right? To give a little bit greater context in which Dr. King's life sits. We go back for a second to Kujo Lewis. Scott versus Sanford, Dred Scott Case. Scott versus Sanford, I see some knowing head nods and I see some, here's another one, pull it up. Scott S-E-O-T-T versus Sand Ford, S-A-N-D-F-O-R-D. Take a second, pull it up. Take a second, pull it up. Those around you, if they don't know, make sure everybody around you has an idea. What are the basics of Scott versus Sanford? When we talk about those things here in the United States, we're talking about Supreme Court Case. Dred Scott Decision. I'm dating myself a little bit. I'm thinking about when Bobby Brown in my prerogative video and he had the boom mic with the, like, some people are laughing. I love that kind of stuff. Aaron mentioned a definitely big time sci-fi there, so this is cool to me. I get to walk around with a microphone. So do we have a solid understanding of Scott versus Sanford, what it was about? Okay, Scott versus Sanford established two very important things during the lifetime of Kajou Lewis. Established two very important things. The first thing that it established is black bodies that are on this soil are not citizens of the United States. They're not citizens of the United States. The second thing that it established as well is that black bodies as they exist on this soil are not human beings. So it established two things. So when we start talking about concepts like institutional racism and we consider how revolutionaries like Dr. King fought against institutional racism and scholars like myself and people who stand in classrooms and say, the United States as an institution is racist. This is what we're talking about. The Supreme Court of the United States determined not somebody's naughty grandfather down in South Carolina who likes the used word nigger too much, right? We're talking about the United States Supreme Courts which establishes how laws are interpreted. Chief Justice Roger Tawny almost quote, I can almost quote it, said the Negro has no rights that need be respected by any white man. Slavery is his place. So slavery as an institution existed exclusively as a function of the lack of humanity of black folks. And when we start talking about how long ago slavery was, I'm trying to bring you to understand that's an anachronistic argument to say that slavery was long ago. It wasn't because it overlaps with Dr. King's life, literally, right? So having established then that black folks are neither citizen nor human, we move forward a little bit to Plessy versus Ferguson. And I'll jump ahead. Wait, why are we talking about Supreme Court cases? Why are we talking that stuff in Dred Scott and Plessy versus Ferguson? Because in 1955, because in 1955, how it was Martin Luther King in 1955, he was born in 1929, y'all mad folks, I gotta keep my mad folks awake. So what, so if he led, helped lead the bus boycott in Montgomery in 1955, he was born in 1929, how it was he? 26 years old at the age of 26, Martin Luther King, Jr., doctor at that time, Martin Luther King, Jr., is leading the Montgomery bus boycott. That's something as I'm talking now, punch that in, type that in to your smart device, Montgomery bus boycott, right? So remember, I'm circling back. So I'm talking about Plessy versus Ferguson. I'm talking about Scott versus Sanford, because all of these things, Martin Luther King's, Martin Luther King's revolutionary attitude, his revolutionary mores, are born of the things that he is experiencing because of what the United States as an institution had established before he was born, but in lives that overlapped his. So we have to understand, you have to understand, we have to understand, why was there bus segregation in 1955? The answer is Plessy versus Ferguson, P-L-E-S-S-Y versus Ferguson, F-E-R-G-U-S-O-N, Plessy versus Ferguson. Give a chance, make sure everybody around you knows what Plessy versus Ferguson, what did it establish? What did the Plessy case establish? Make sure, if you're not sure, if you're not sure, ask someone around you. We usually say three words when we bring up Plessy versus Ferguson. What are the three words that we think of when we say Plessy versus Ferguson? Absolutely. Absolutely, right? But if we just leave it, if we just leave it at that, Plessy versus Ferguson separate but equal. Then we don't understand why Martin Luther King after Rosa Parks decided one day that she was no longer going to sit in segregated seating, she wasn't gonna give up her seat as an African-American woman if we don't understand what Plessy versus Ferguson means that we can't couch that in terms that make us, one, understand why that was happening, but two, that should give us pause, it should give us outrage. How long before, if you looked up Plessy versus Ferguson, how long before Rosa Parks sat down, right? And they started at Bus Boycott. How long was Plessy versus Ferguson before that? Look at it, 1896, 1955, right? So in 1955, Rosa Parks, a old lady was on a bus and she was real tired. And one day she just happened to sit down on the bus and was like, I'm so tired. And then some mean old white people came up to her and she was like, I'm old and tired. I don't want to get up. That's what we learned, right? That's what we learned, that's what happened. Rosa Parks was an old lady who decided one day she was tired. Some of y'all like nah, hell nah, we know better than that. Rosa Parks, Rosa Parks was in her 40s. In fact, Rosa Parks is young, oh man, time is flying. Rosa Parks decided not as an old woman, but young, I'd like to think I'm young. As a young woman who was also involved with, she was a secretary with the local NAACP, she decided to engage in an act of protest. Skrr, Homer Plessy decided to engage in an act of protest. Homer Plessy, if he walked into, well if he walked into the room right now, he'd be old as hell, he'd be mummified, like 200, something years old, right? He'd be like, oh shit, right? But Homer Plessy looked, Homer Plessy looked like a white person, right? As we use our visual here, especially in the western hemisphere, how we decide how people exist in terms of race, if he walked, he would assume he's a white person. So Homer Plessy had it set up because Homer Plessy also identified as black. So Homer Plessy sat down in a white train car. Rosa Parks sat down in the white section on the bus and engaged in an act of protest. And it was a setup, so he got himself arrested purposefully because they were trying to challenge in the Supreme Court, right? Not burn a train car down, I'm with that too, right? But there are different ways to engage in protest. And so when we hear things like, but it was so long ago, those things are over. Haven't we moved beyond that? We have to put those things again into historical context. It's not over. That's why 60 years after Plessy versus Ferguson, Rosa Parks is still doing the same damn thing. Even though in 1954 Howard University graduate, Thurgood Marshall argued in front of the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court decided, what was the case? 1954, Thurgood Marshall, team 54, Thurgood Marshall, put it in context, Plessy versus Ferguson, separate but equal, 1954, Martin Luther King is 24 years old, what's the case? 1954, Supreme Court, Brown, yeah. Brown versus Board of Education. Brown versus Board of Education. So the United States and this, y'all gotta fill me on this. Remember that the Chief Justice of the United States back in Scott versus Samford had said the Negro has no rights that need be respected by any white man. That slavery is his natural God ordained place. 1954, Chief Justice Earl Warren says, because of the history of racism, separate is inherently unequal. The United States, as an institution, said we are racist. It's not the radical black activists, right? The United States Supreme Court said, due to the history of racism, separate is inherently unequal. Homer Plessy understood that. Rosa Parks understood that. Claudette Colvin understood that. Claudette Colvin. Uh-huh, C-L-A-U-D-E-T-T-E. Colvin, C-O-L-V-I-N, take a second and share the knowledge, share the knowledge. Make sure people around you know who get to know somebody if you ask them their name or whatever. Who was Claudette Colvin? C-L-A-U-D-E-T-T-E. Colvin, C-O-L-V-I-N. Make sure people around you know who that is. Gotta give me thumbs up, head nod. We know who Claudette Colvin is. Respectability politics said, we can't use Claudette Colvin. We've gotta use Rosa Parks. Respectability politics, when respectability becomes political, the perfect victim, right? Trayvon Martin had on a black hoodie and he had gotten kicked out of, he had gotten suspended a couple of times for smoking weed and we saw on his phone, he had some videos of people fighting. You know what the underlying argument is there? What's the underlying argument? Yeah, that therefore he deserved to be killed by the neighborhood watch guy. That's the underlying argument. That's when respectability becomes political, right? Dr. Dahlberry was jogging and he had on a black hoodie and he was shot by the neighborhood watch guy, please don't let that happen, right? Oh, this is terrible. It's outrageous. He didn't have videos of people fighting on his phone. He'd never been kicked out for smoking weed. This is now terrible. But this other person, right? That's what happened with Claudette Colvin, right? That's what happened with her as a teenager. Who was pregnant? But still face discrimination. The same stuff that was supposed to have ended. It was supposed to be separate but equal. We disproved that. The United States Supreme Court said why? But then we had to use Rosa Parks, right? How long did the Montgomery bus boycott last? Martin Luther King, after having graduated, not only, so he started high school, he started, he graduated from high school at 15 years old. And then he went to another HBCU, not quite as great as Howard University, but a phenomenal institution, Morehouse College. And then he graduated from Morehouse and then he went on to get his PhD from Boston University. And yeah, while he was at Boston University becoming a formal scholar, you're gonna read about, yeah, absolutely, he plagiarized some stuff. His dissertation was suspect. He didn't do enough of his own work when he got his PhD, when he did his scholarship, however. Everything that he did afterward more than proved he was a scholar. The reason why he engaged in nonviolent protest is because he studied nonviolent protest. He didn't make a decision and say, I'm afraid to be violent. He made a decision and said, within, I'm getting it now, within this hemisphere that is based on the plunder and violence against black bodies. A country that is always at war, that is consistently and constantly engaging in acts of violence. For me to engage in acts of nonviolence is revolutionary. It's radical. It's abnormal. And so he went to India and studied nonviolence as a scholar and studied nonviolent protest and the legacy of Gandhi. He wasn't, like we saw what Rosa Parks was afraid and she was old and tired. She wasn't tired, she was protesting. Martin Luther King wasn't afraid. He was a scholar of nonviolent protest. He studied it in situ, right? Latin phrase, I-N-S-I-T-U, right? You can look that one up too. He studied it, because he was a scholar. At the same time in Boston, around that time there was another guy, Malcolm Little. He was calling him Detroit Red at the time. You got it, right? Around that same time. A guy who's named Detroit Red, hustler living that street life, right? Goes on, right? Becomes Malcolm X, becomes Malik Shabazz. Malcolm X challenges Martin Luther King, right? And we see that they're always juxtaposed against each other, right? That you have the dreamer, the nonviolent guy, right? The one who is ready to acquiesce versus the one who has cutlass in iman, right? Ready to send Lucifer to outer space. But here's the thing, right? Here's what we challenge, circling back. We're talking about the enslavement of black folks here. And Malcolm had a thing where he talked about the house slave and the field slave. You're all familiar with that when he talked about the house slave and the field slave. And he would say, the field slave was at the end of the overseer's whip. The field slave had to work from sea to can't see. The field slave was not in Master's house, but lived out in a shack on the plantation. The field slave felt the beating sun down on their backs, right? And he said, when Master's house caught on fire, they were hoping for a stiff breeze to burn it all down. But that field, but that house slave, the house slave would say, Master, our house is burning down. We need to put the fire out. But one of the things that Malcolm overlooked, and one of the things that we have to understand is, and I know I got to, because I want to do some Q and A too. One of the things that Martin Luther King understood was, and we have to remember, that the house slave was closer to the seat of punishment. Those of us who, you know, black folks, we call light-skinned it, right? This is the idea then, right? We bore, right? We bore just in the color of our skin the punishment, the plunder of the black female bodies that were happening in the house. So they were closer to what was happening. And so they engaged in acts of resistance that weren't overt. They had to be covert. But they engaged in resistance all the same. So taking a more nuanced view than Malcolm X offered us, Martin Luther King in that same vein and understanding, very clear, Malcolm was calling Martin Luther King a house slave. But again, it overlooks the fact that the house slave bore the brunt. They were around mass a way more than the field slave. So in understanding that, as we engaged in an acts of revolution, then we have to understand there are different ways to do it. It can be violent. It can be nonviolent. Circling back to my thesis, as Martin Luther King as a scholar who studied nonviolence, who existed in a hemisphere based upon the plunder of black bodies and black bodies as capital, non-human capital, Martin Luther King engaged in acts and I would argue the ultimate acts of revolution. So I'll kind of cut where I was talking there and give an opportunity for you all, let's engage in some dialogue and some discussion. If you have questions for me or you want to make some statements. That's one of the ironies and one of the things that everyone here, I think everyone in this country should read letter from a Birmingham jail because it speaks to those things. One of the things that we've done is we have turned Martin Luther King into someone who was afraid of revolution. But if you look at the, I mean understand the acts of violence that happened against him. He was 30 years old. He might have been 30 years old when he first experienced act of violence. A woman stabbed him during a book signing and he nearly lost his life. He was on the front line, literally on the front line as he was engaging in acts of revolution, putting his life on the line and was killed for it. No different than any other quote unquote soldier, right? In revolution. One of the things that has happened and Dr. King recognized this in his final book, Howard University graduate Stokely Carmichael when he was a protege of Dr. King broke off from him and with the student nonviolent coordinated committee he created the phrase black power. And so what Dr. King realized is that Stokely was speaking to those folks who said, you know what, the nonviolent thing is cool and all but we need to engage in action. You know, Malcolm X said, you know, look, white man put his hand on you, send him to the grave, right? And so Stokely Carmichael, Malcolm X, speak to what I argue is a much more American positionality which is, yeah, you know, we don't kick your ass. That's what America is consistently. United States of America is consistently been about. That's why it's always at war. And so that's why Martin Luther King gets excised, gets extricated from the list of revolutionaries, right? And he's put into this place where we're comfortable with him and that comes to realize by 19, so 1963 Martin Luther King Jr. won a Nobel Peace Prize. By 1967 here in the United States, you know what? They did Gallup poll, right? Harris polls where they do approval ratings, the same ones they use now, right? Tell you how popular your current impeached president is, right? And Martin Luther King's approval ratings amongst Americans, low 30s. Most Americans did not like Martin Luther King Jr. And that's not just do you like Martin Luther King Jr. This was breaking down, I've seen some of the surveys before in the questions they asked, do you agree with his policies? Do you think he causes violence? That's gaslighting right there. Do you think he incites people to violence? Do you think he pushes too far? And most of the United States, which is mostly white, right? That's mostly white people. They were not fans of his, they did not like him. So it's why it's real, it's bizarre to look back at it. Now those same polls, his approval rating is like 95%, right? But those same folks during his lifetime before they co-opted who Martin Luther King was, they did not like him. They didn't like what he stood for. And so his image, his likeness, his revolution, his radicalness has been extricated from the conversation in ways that quite honestly make conservatives and make racists feel comfortable. It's a similar reason why most of us in here, let's see, I wanna see a show of hands. Raise your hand if you know who Bayard Rustin is, okay? Bayard Rustin was a mentor of Martin Luther King. If you ever watched the movie Selma, right? Bayard Rustin's one of the main characters in the movie. Bayard Rustin was an openly gay man in the 1950s and 60s, an openly gay black man, right? So for those same reasons why we are not as familiar, and plus Rustin took this weird turn at the end of his life. Maybe he took this neoconservative turn at the end of his life, which was bizarre, but still doesn't negate his legacy, right? So again, a mentor of Dr. King, someone who were literally signed by side with him, who the movement split away from as he began to be more outspoken and open about his sexuality, right? So the same way that the civil rights movement looking for the respectable victim chose Rosa Parks, the NAACP secretary, the seamstress, the happily married heterosexual woman, as opposed to the teenage girl who absolutely should have the exact same rights as the 40-year-old happily married heterosexual seamstress, right? But she was pregnant. And we said, well, we can't promote teen pregnancy, right? Cause they'll be pushed back. Yes, and yes, Martin Luther King posed the greater threat to the white power structure. Martin Luther King had literally had the ear of the president. 1964, right? Martin Luther King at 35 years old is, and you can look up the picture, right? Lyndon Johnson, the president is sitting down and got the pen signing the Civil Rights Act, right? And Martin Luther King is standing over his shoulder smiling, right? So Martin Luther King had the ear of the planet. That's what he did. Malcolm spoke to putting the United States on trial for its human rights abuses against folks, black folks in particular, but against marginalized folks in the United States in a pan-African way. Martin Luther King utilized the media to do it. So in this area, as those of us who were critical race theorists, right? In this interest convergence, Lyndon Johnson was ambivalent about civil rights, right? On one hand, he was an advocate and on the other hand, he was a redneck from Texas, right? But as communism is spreading throughout the 1950s and 60s and McCarthyism and we're worried about, literally the Soviet Union is putting missiles or trying to put missiles in Cuba, right? The previous president who had been murdered had to stop Khrushchev from putting missiles in Cuba, nuclear missiles to fire against the United States. And so people like Che Guevara's leading revolutions, he's in African countries, he's in Angola, right? And he is arming black folks against colonizers, right? And so the United States is fighting the spread of communism. They may or may not give a shit about black people here in the United States, but they are fighting communism and every time they come on TV, so now you've got these Cuban freedom fighters who are liberating black folks in these African countries and they're talking about the rights of the black man in this hemisphere and every time Martin Luther King is walking on TV, he's getting his ass kicked, he's engaging, he's getting brutalized, right? And so all these countries, as communism is spreading, these countries are looking and they're all people of color, because most of the planet is not white people, right? So they're like, your capitalism, it sounds cool because I like the blue jeans and air-conditioned internet, I'm being an agronistic, right? Like, it's cool to have stuff, but the way that y'all treating these black folks, that don't look right. And I look and I identify with them, right? So Martin Luther King, by putting the United States on trial in the media, definitely was the greater threat to the white power structure. Malcolm spoke more to the black power structure, right? And so he was speaking to empowering kids, like kids, I say, like, you know, students at the time, Stokely Carmichael, right? He was speaking to kids like Louis Farrakhan, he was speaking to those people who were thinking, and these are parts of a whole, in my opinion, he was speaking to them and the black empowerment, the side that says, I don't give a damn about the white power structure, here's what we need to build, here's what we're gonna do. We will arm ourselves. So he was speaking to the black panthers and the deacons for defense, right? He was speaking to that like the cutlass in him on, right? Which is where Malcolm stood. So they're parts of a whole, but again, to, you know, to solidify that, to answer your question, Martin Luther King was the greater threat to the white power structure. And Malcolm X terrified the white power structure because he was empowering the black power structure. Because he was, especially because he was specifically talking to the people that eventually become the black power movement, the black panthers, once you hit the 70s and they stopped being willing to, they stopped being willing to sit down with the white president anymore, did that shift. Like, so you talked about the approval rating of Martin Luther King. Did they even do approval ratings of people like Malcolm X at that same time? That's a good question. Whereas by the 70s, those names became far more paid attention to by the, that same power structure. Yeah, it's an interesting point, it's an important point. There's a shift that happens in the white power structure and they find Martin Luther King's message more co-optable. It's why you hear the remnants and the legacy of that now in those conservative talking points, right, that Martin Luther King said, we are for the, we wanna judge people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. And that's now couched as an argument to say, so Martin Luther King was color blind, right? He didn't want us to see race, which is actually 180 degrees opposite of what Martin Luther King said. When there's a speech, you can look it up. He's like, I wanna get the language right. I'm almost quoting. He's like, I wanna get the language right tonight. I'm black, yes, I'm black and proud and beautiful, right? So that's who Martin Luther King was. But because he was nonviolent, he was more palatable, right, whereas Malcolm X was not as palatable. So between the two, whose message could be co-opt, it was Martin Luther King's message. And so that's why his approval rating, Martin Luther King's approval rating is high, but I argue the same percentage of people actually agree with his stances. Most Americans now would not agree with where he stood. And I didn't hear the first part of what you said. Okay, what I'm trying to say is this, about you saying for Malcolm X, more Luther King, right? But back then too, we had the same problems for us getting shot in the murder and all the above. Yeah, we see how the same problems today that we had back then. So it's like repeating this stuff. For sure, we're fighting the same battles, right? It's that, like I talked about, you know, this Rosa Parks was fighting the same damn battle that Homer Plessy was fighting, right? Martin Luther King is fighting the same damn battle that Frederick Douglass was fighting, right? But not quite the same fight as like Ida B. Wells. Ida B. Wells was, Ida B. Wells say, look, we're pulling the shotguns out, right? Like, black folks are being lynched. So here's one thing we can do. I'm gonna make the speech, but you come to lynch us, right? So different legacies of the parts of the same hole, but yeah, we're still fighting the same fights. And to the previous point, it's because the messages have been co-opted, right? And so we get gas lit, right? We are told that it is us who causes the violent responses that Dr. King writes about that in a letter from a Birmingham jail. And so again, I did impute Dr. King's scholarship at Boston University, but understand, everything he wrote after that was his own and was absolutely brilliant and probably more brilliant than anything anyone else at BU has ever put out, right? That's hyperbolic, but yeah, we're still fighting the same fights. Things have gotten better, no question, right? Things have gotten better, but they're not fixed. And so the difference in the discrepancy between better and fixed is now centered in the debate. And so people will conflate the two, right? Well, Martin Luther King was murdered, right? For what he believed in, but Dr. Dahlberry can stand in here and talk about white people who hated Martin Luther King. It's not what I'm talking about, but figuratively speaking, right? So yeah, it's the fact that we continue to fight the same fight and it's the reason why I brought up Scott Versanford and it's the reason why I talked about violence being embedded in this hemisphere. It's because we're fighting that still. We're still fighting to recognize the humanity and the civil, excuse me, the civilian rights of black folks, which is why we're still fighting those things. I kind of want to, hi, Dr. Dahlberry, yes. So I kind of want to piggyback a little bit off Lawrence and ask, was Dr. King's message more palatable because his nonviolence was more accepted as he's not preaching stand up against the master, he's just asking us not to beat on them anymore or they didn't accept Malcolm X because if they would've armed us, we probably would've went out and shot them all. And so I'm asking, are we dealing with the same issues because we didn't arm ourselves and fight back then and fire with fire? So now we're living in a legacy of Dr. King that's been taken, put into a white framework to make them comfortable with it and we're still preaching the same nonviolence, but we're still murdered in the streets. We're still killed by cops. I'm sure we're still lynched in certain places and I'm wondering if we would've armed ourselves, if this narrative could've possibly been different because maybe violence is the only way to make violent people understand that, hey, I don't deal with violence. Yeah, that's an important point you bring up, Shwana, and I'm pulling up the letter from a Birmingham jail and this is one of the things that he says. He's challenging white people and he's challenging the white clergy, he says, in your statement, you assert that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence, but is this a logical assertion? Isn't this like condemning a robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery? Isn't this like condemning Socrates because his unwavering commitment to truth and his philosophical inquiries precipitated the act by the misguided populace in which they made him drink hemlock, right? And so he's saying that it's a, Malcolm X and they call it a super trick, right? It doesn't matter, it's the answer. Whether it is violent or nonviolent because at its core, whether you choose violence or whether you choose nonviolence at the core is the plunder of black folks and the reduction, dismantling and denial of black humanity. The answer in my opinion is both. So you needed the Panthers and Malcolm and Martin understood this and they understood it in their own conversations like Malcolm told, we didn't know. Oops, Malcolm told Martin like, I need you and you need me, right? We need you in there so, because you can sit down with the president, right? And Martin was like, I need you because yeah, I need them to know like, nah, I got the cut list, I'm leaving with your hand, right? But again, the palatability of nonviolence in a violent country makes things easier. It made Martin's message much more co-optable and it made the Black Panthers message basically impenetrable, right? So when they armed themselves, the response from like the NRA, the response from Governor Reagan at the time became President Reagan. You know what the response was when the Panthers armed themselves? Was it the Waldron at, what was that that they've had? Mulford. Mulford, right? Where they said, we're actually going to reduce the NRA wanted to reduce the rights. So even if you arm yourself, right? So that's what says the super trick. If you were to arm yourself, then they go back to institutions, right? You're challenging the institutions, they go to the violence, right? So you have to fight on both fronts. That makes it, you know, there's another, did you add your hand? Yeah. Hold on one second, excuse me. I just wanted to hear your opinions about just today and how there's a different fight to be had. And it's more, it's not so black and white, excuse the pun, but black and white in terms of laws. It's more, racism is showing up more in society, in the private sector, things that don't necessarily have a lot attached to it. So I just wanted to understand like what you thought should be kind of the strategy for promoting love and acceptance and getting rid of racism. And I mean, I know that's never gonna be completely gone, but I just wanted to understand like what, how that could be done today. Yeah. Using Martin Luther King's. Absolutely. I'm a huge fan of Martin Luther King's conception of brotherhood, right? And humanity getting along and his visions of little white boys and white girls and then people of all races, those things are. And that's one of the things that has happened. The pushback against him has made him Pollyannish, right? To say that, look all that pie and the sky and stuff and we still getting shot down in the street. And both of those things are true simultaneously. But on its surface, on its surface, the idea that like, Rocket King, but the idea that we really did all get along and we ended racism, like we saw each other's race and acknowledge the physical differences that we have that make up these so-called races, but existed without racism, that we would, that we remove racial hierarchies, those things are, those are aspirational. They shouldn't be aspirational. They should be what we're fighting for. I think it's parts of the same whole in terms of Malcolm and Martin and the idea of either violence or non-violence. They're still aspirational. They still want peace, right? And still want people to either get along or get along separately. You know, go their separate way, but to get along. And so, the challenge that is faced in carrying a legacy of love, the way that Martin Luther King engaged in it, it's hard. It's difficult. It does subject you to more violence. It's just too different. It's just two different roads to travel. And I think we can go back and forth. We can go back and forth between the two. Ultimately, I argue, though, the institutions have to change. I argue less against changing hearts and minds of people, right? Like Ruby Bridges. I know y'all still got to Ruby Bridges, right? Ruby Bridges, the woman who integrated schools in Louisiana. When we think about school integration, we think about, you know, Brown versus Board, right? Ruby Bridges is a six-year-old kid, five-year-old kid. She spent an entire year going to school in an empty building. And look, Ruby Bridges, this is not, that's why I always, that's why I start about this anachronistic idea that, well, it was so long ago. Ruby Bridges visited Barack Obama. Ruby Bridges, you could invite her today, right? And she could come here and speak. And she is engaged in civil rights activism. As a kid, she went to a school by herself because white parents in Louisiana said, if we put our children in the school with this black child, it's gonna ruin education. A calendar year, right? She spent a year by herself until white parents put their kids back in schools. So the idea that, like, I always wonder, like, what are those kids doing now? I know Ruby Bridges is doing now, cause she's famous. But what are those kids doing now? They didn't, did they just change their minds, right? And are you gonna change their minds? If it was serious enough for their parents to say, nah, you cannot, you literally can't go to school. I'll take my child out of school now for a couple of days. That's why I want you to look up the bus boy card too. That was 381 days. That's a huge investment, right? Just like taking your child out of school for an entire year. Are you gonna change that person's mind? Are they terrible people? I don't know, and it doesn't matter. But we need to change the institutions is my argument, right? And whether it is through the perceived threat of violence or through nonviolence and acts of protest, that's where it lies. So I diverge from Martin Luther King's conceptions of hearts and minds and changing hearts and minds. I'm not so into, I mentioned I'm a critical race theorist. I am not so into hearts and minds. I had to come in late and I was looking forward to hearing you. But I was wondering if at all possible, respectfully, I asked if you could just give me a few tidbits from what you talked about today so I can kind of have a better understanding from where everybody's coming from. I had a 10 a.m. class so I couldn't get here until, you know. You and Cliff knows of the speech. Yes. I'll give you my thesis, right? And very quickly, my thesis is, and I think it speaks to the discussion that we're having now, that in a hemisphere and in a country that is mired and couched in violence and mired and couched specifically in violence that involves the plunder of black bodies, that him engaging as a nonviolent activist who experienced all types of violence, in fact the ultimate form of violence was a revolution, right? And makes him a revolutionary and a radical in addition to a scholar. That was the main point that I was making. I had sort of a question if I may just jump in. And you got more behind you too. You know, I'm thinking of context. I think about my grandparents in Mississippi, Holmes County, Central Mississippi, LaFleur County just north of 1955 in Mitt Hill is murdered brutally, right? For allegedly cat calling out a white woman, right? Kidnapped out of his house. In 1964, 65, Freedom Summer, Neshoba County to the east of Holmes County. You have Cheney, Schwerner and Goodman, college students like yourself or many of you who are part of the civil rights active movement and their goal is to register black voters in the state of Mississippi. I think of Rosa Parks in her autobiography. If you watch the documentary, The Rape of Risi Taylor, she talks about growing up in the house where her father, it was common to have guns in the house. And you have to ask yourself why? Because my grandparents were black people lived in the state of terror. And so sort of to kind of getting, like to segue back to the conversation trying to add it, this is fascinating to me. I kind of think about, how do you engage or how do you achieve that level of love and brotherhood in a society where one group is not allowed to protect itself from violence? By the group who they're supposed to be in relationship with. And then maybe kind of projecting it forward for students who are active, who are engaged in organizing. How do you deal with this sort of, I don't know if it's a trap, what do you want to call it, where if I've talked to folks back home, there's a clear understanding that non-violence is supported by self-defense. And so we have to be clear with violence and self-defense, they go together. What kind of advice maybe would you give so students or people here when that dichotomy gets presented to them? How do you respond to that? Or how, historically, how have people responded to that so that they can achieve their goals? And I hope, I hate to put you on the spot that way. You know, what I tell students, you know, like when I was teaching at Bothell, you know, when working with different student groups and I would talk to some of their organizations, their social justice organizations, I would remind them and let them know that you have to be purposeful about how you engage and you have to pick and execute and protect yourself at the same time. For most of us, thankfully, it ends up being simply protecting ourselves from the folks in the room who do not have our best interests in mind, but who show up and that's normal. I don't know who it is in this room. It may not be you right now, but it may be you later on. It's tough. Like, people aren't just evil, right? They don't just like, I'm leaving here, going to the police, right? It's not that way. It's something happens and then you end up saying something, right? And then you end up jeopardizing someone else. So in the nonviolent and in the ways of verbal protest, right, protecting yourselves in that way to speak to what you were saying, that's one of the reasons why the Panthers and the Deacons for Defense, in particular Louisiana and Mississippi, were so important because they used the threat of counter violence in fact as a way to maintain peace, right? And that conundrum is something that I think is as American as it gets, right? The United States has the most powerful military in the history of humanity. As far as we know, in the history of this solar system, ain't nobody else that exists, right? Nobody else that we know can blow up the planet. The Roman Empire was really, really powerful and they would have been decimated by one jet, right? So they've created the most powerful fighting force in the history of humanity and wield that as a common threat to say, hey, listen, we wanna talk, but ultimately we gonna kick your ass, right? And so it speaks to, you know, you have to speak people's language and it takes both. And we have to be very, very careful, especially when people are using the message, for example, of non-violence in order to get us to acquiesce to violence, which was never what Martin Luther King was about. He was, again, using the violence and putting it on international in this new thing called television, right? So now we can actually see pictures of what's happening. So I'm not gonna shoot back, right? I'm not gonna, I'm not getting the cutlass, but I'm gonna show the world who you are. I'm gonna challenge your morality and I'm gonna challenge your morality on the grounds that you claim your own morality, here in the land of the free and the home of the brave, right? Indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. I'm gonna take all these things that you project inwardly and outwardly and I'm gonna show how you come up short, which, again, can be as powerful as taking up arms and raiding Harper's Ferry. But, again, it requires both and an understanding that, yeah, your life is gonna be in jeopardy, can be in jeopardy either way. If that answers your question, I mean, that's a tough one, man, that's a great question. I think we have time for one more question. Yeah, my man, of course I'm gonna get in there. I just wanted to, I actually agree with King's passive approach, but I think the real question is, I'd like you to elaborate on, isn't the struggle for people of color more within than out? We have to stop perpetuating black violence against ourselves because I think if you have an adversary who is not well-intentioned, you certainly can't do anything to inflame the situation and I think perpetuating violence against ourselves only gives them a reason to commit more violence. What you're talking about is interesting because that's really where Malcolm X and that's where the nation was, right, in the nation of Islam. The nation of Islam said, how can we expect, and here's one of the things that I pushed back and challenged Malcolm X's conceptions, right? Malcolm X consistently went to, and my grandma would do the same thing, right? My grandmother, God rest her soul, lover to death from a little haystack in North Carolina, my grandmother went to the grave saying that she would never have a black doctor, right? And in her concern, now I'm not saying what, that's what you're saying, right? But, so I'm separating. And she would, you know, because she just did not believe that a black person could do, there's an old expression, the white man's ice is colder, right, that makes sense. The white man's ice is colder, better, right? The conception that there is and buying into a white sense of superiority. So Malcolm would say, the white man would never let you come into his community, take his woman, engage in acts of violence against him. The white man would never let you take his money and invest in his own businesses, right? And that's an important message to understand about black empowerment, right? And to your point, it is, and they challenged other black folks, hey, tighten up, clean up. Part of that, though, the danger, the problem, when that becomes problematic, right? When that becomes problematic is when it moves into respectability politics, right? So now, Claudette Colvin cannot be a face in the civil rights movement, well, because she got pregnant before she was married, right? When it moves into respectability politics, right, that's when the inward reflection actually takes on notions of white supremacy and black inferiority. So absolutely, there is embedded, right? Violence in, there's a disproportionate amount of violence in African-American and in black communities, but we go back to what is the root of that violence, right? So we have to come, and I challenged this, and I taught college education, I challenged my students, I said this to them, right? No matter where you go in the country, it's Seattle, Miami, Detroit, Chicago, Boston, wherever you go, right? There is this achievement gap in education, right? It doesn't matter where you go. There's an achievement gap, black, brown, southeast yellow, right? Red folks are at the bottom of this achievement gap, and you have to come to a fundamental conclusion. Either there is something inherently and fundamentally wrong with those people that causes, for example, black folks to be more violent, less intelligent, more hypersexual, we either say those are the reasons why or systemically and systematically, things have been done to these communities that have caused these communities to be that way, and it's not because of the color of their skin, it's because of institutionally what has been done to those folks in their community. It doesn't matter who you put in that community. So for example, I lived in Minneapolis, right? And Minneapolis has a huge Hmong population, and the Eastern and Southeast Asian people, right? And the Hmong folks were doing worse, right? Standardized test scores, GPAs, graduation rates, but had been similarly disenfranchised. So when folks are disenfranchised, when folks are victimized by systemic racism, that's what happens to them regardless of their race or ethnicity. It's a human response to systemic and systematic violence and institutional racism. And so that's where I make the distinction, because on one hand, again, there's personal responsibility and there is improving what black folks are doing, but in answering and in solving that, we cannot begin with black pathology, the idea that there is something inherently wrong with black folks, because then we're not going to be able to fix the problem because the problem is the institution that dehumanized black folks. If you wanna know why someone black kills someone black and that's disproportionate, it's because we, everyone in this hemisphere has been taught what Roger Taney told us in the Dred Scott case that black people are neither human nor citizen. So if you have been inundated for centuries with the idea that black humanity is not as important, is not as valuable, then you value black lives less no matter who you are. That's not a black thing. That's an American thing. That's an institutional thing. It's something we've all been taught if you exist in this hemisphere. So does that answer your child pushback? Unless we don't have time. I'm curious to hear what you're... I just think at some point, we understand that from a societal standpoint, it's the program, it's social learning and attitude to value the target group. But at some point, the minorities have to band together. There has to be some cohesion because you can both increase the value of yourself by valuing each other. So there has to be another Martin Luther King type push for black cohesion. I've always asked by Michael Jackson, Oprah Winfrey, all of our athletes don't band together to start their own political parties. To push for their own bands, we just have to gain unity. I get it that the structure is still designed to order progress, to commit violence, but it has to start from within a thing. I think we can't hurt ourselves that way. Sure. I agree that there is that portion. I think of it this way, right? We can inoculate ourselves, right? We can take it upon ourselves to say, all right, I exist in this toxic environment, right? Lani Guinear uses the analogy of minor canaries, right? She's another civil rights, excuse me, critical race theorist, right? Lawyer, Princeton, Harvard, because that means something. Not as good as Howard, but Lani Guinear uses the minor's canary analogy, right? And she says, you know, you've got these minor's canary. If you know what the whole old school analogy, and I know we're running tight, the old school analogy of a minor's canary, right? Back in the day, way back in the day before, we had electronics like this. They used to send a canary down in a mine, right? And the canary would go down far enough, and at a certain point, if the mine was toxic, the canary would die. And so then the minors knew, hey, we can go this far, but we can't go this far because this is a toxic environment. And so one of the things that we've tried to do, for example, in schools, not in schools for a long time, one of the things that we've tried to do, right, and this is Lani Guinear's analogy, is like we take the canaries, right? And we take the little canaries and be like, hey, look at the sparrows. The sparrows can go further down in the mine. Why don't you little canaries more like the sparrows? Look how tough they are, they can go further down. And then we come up with these, we put little gas masks, right, on the minors' canaries, like hey, if you put this little mask on you, then you can, you know, yourself, you can go down further in the mine. But we lose sight of the original problem. The original problem is that the environment itself is toxic. We're not fixing the canaries, right? We don't need tougher canaries. We need folks who are detoxifying the environment. If we see black children and black and brown and these marginalized kids as valuable, as coal, as diamonds, right? If we see them as that, then we will detoxify the environment to make that investment, to dig out these gyms and these jewels, right? So it is a function, right? We do have that personal responsibility. But to me, the bigger fight is against the toxicity of the environment itself. I would love to get your question. Unfortunately, we're out of time. We have to transition to our next speaker. You're welcome to follow up and ask questions. When I want to talk to Dr. Dober after work. I'll stick around. I love this. I should want to thank you all, again, for coming out, listening to our lecture, being a part of the MLK Week talks. Please give your appreciation to Dr. Dober. Mori Dober.