At WNYC's Martin Luther King tribute at the Apollo, new calls for activism

What would have been the 95th birthday of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was marked with an exploration of the late civil rights leader’s politics and its relevance to the present.

The Sunday event “The Inconvenient King: Was MLK Woke?” was co-hosted by WNYC’s Kai Wright and Michael Hill at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. It aired on Notes from America with Kai Wright on Sunday and will re-air 2 p.m. today–the national holiday honoring King.

Panelists included Jonathan Eig, author of “King, A Life”; Juliet Hooker, author of “Black Grief/White Grievance: The Politics of Loss”; and Rahiel Tesfamariam, a theologian and former Washington Post columnist.

Eig said that for many people, the late civil rights leader was indeed inconvenient.

“He was too radical for many people, certainly many white liberals,” said Eig. “Especially when he started talking about northern racism. And he was too conservative for many of the younger Black leaders. Stokely Carmichael, Black Panthers, Malcolm X. They used King as a foil in a way to make themselves look more courageous. And so King was getting it from all sides.”

Hooker, the Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence in Political Science at Brown University, said King was especially criticized in the last years of his life. King was assassinated in 1968.

“The later King is the King of the Poor People’s campaign who’s focused on economic inequality,” said Hooker. “It’s also the King who’s denouncing U.S. militarism. So he’s definitely much more radical than he's often portrayed as being.”

According to Hooker, many of King’s sharpest critiques of the U.S., whether it concerned capitalism or the war in Vietnam, have fallen by the wayside as he and his allies have been romanticized.

She said historical revisionists often criticize modern-day protesters by arguing, wrongly, that the civil rights movement of the 1960s was made up of “well dressed, well-spoken protesters” whose demands were met because they were polite.

“The whole point of the civil rights movement was to make people uncomfortable,” said Hooker. “It was to create conflict. I mean, they responded peacefully. But the point was disruption.”

The event considered the history of the word “woke,” from its early use in Black communities–as early as 1938, the singer Lead Belly warned listeners to “stay woke” in his song, “Scottsboro Boys”–to its eventual cooptation by conservatives who argue that contemporary activists have gone too far in their social justice demands.

Eig argued that King was woke and urged others to be as well.

“He said it himself,” said Eig. “He said, ‘Our very survival depends on staying awake and adapting to change and continuing to fight.’”

“What he’s trying to do is wake us,” Eig continued. “He sees his job as being a spotlight. I’m going to shine a spotlight on the worst of American racism and I’m going to shine that spotlight until you do something about it.”

Tesfamariam, the theologian and former Washington Post columnist, urged the crowd to become “radically inconvenient.”

She argued that the U.S. has a "facade of freedom" that unfortunately makes us very comfortable.

"And if you are going to do anything for future generations," Tesfamariam said, "the first step is to become uncomfortable being an American. It will change your relationship to capitalism, it will change what you consume, it will change the networks that you watch on television."

She added: “You will begin to say to yourself, ‘I’m beginning to see what being American does to millions of people all across the world who are suffering because of my tax dollars.’”

Her words drew loud cheers.