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King's Legacy in 2026
00:15:21
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| $1,000 a month. | ||
| Now, can we just do it arbitrarily? | ||
| Of course not. | ||
| However, we should at least experiment with market-based solutions to do these things that we have insisted government do. | ||
| Medicare, oh, I'm getting my Medicare now and my Social Security. | ||
| And I'm finding out even more so how flawed these programs are and how they're not doing the benefit programs that they say they are or having the advantage that they say. | ||
| If you don't have extra resources to buy a supplemental plan, you're really in a socialist plan and you're not going to get the care that you need over time. | ||
| So I just really think that this is a reset opportunity for us to say, all right, we're looking at yesterday's programs. | ||
| No other program other than these have we still had 100 years later. | ||
| No other business. | ||
| You know, even SACS is saying, okay, 100 years later, you know, we have to do a different model. | ||
| So I think that as a society, we should think about new models. | ||
| We're not the same people we were in the 30s, and especially when it comes to private equity and/or our gains. | ||
| Curepolicy.org is the website for the Center for Urban Renewal and Education. | ||
| Star Parker, the founder, joining us on the Washington Journal today. | ||
| Thank you for your time. | ||
| You're welcome, Pedro. | ||
| It's been good being with you again. | ||
| We're going to hear another. | ||
| Peniel Joseph is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. | ||
| He is the founding director of the Center for Study of Race and Democracy. | ||
| Joining us here on Washington Journal on this Martin Luther King Jr. Day. | ||
| Professor, good morning. | ||
| Hey, good morning, Pedro, and happy MLK Day. | ||
| I want to take you back 10 years ago. | ||
| You wrote an op-ed, but you said this about Dr. King in the middle of May of 2016. | ||
| You said the full measure of King's legacy requires nothing less than to honestly wrestle with the hard truths that he publicly confronted a half century ago and that remain perhaps even more fiercely urgent in our own time than this. | ||
| That was 10 years ago. | ||
| How does that hold up today? | ||
| Well, it holds up extraordinarily well. | ||
| I think that King, who was born January 15th, 1929, is really born in an age where people are struggling against totalitarianism. | ||
| They're struggling against colonialism and imperialism, racism. | ||
| But they believe that a new world can be built and can be possible. | ||
| And that's coming out of the Second World War, the freedom surges, the anti-colonial movements happening globally, and of course the civil rights insurgency happening in the United States and not just the South. | ||
| It's happening in the North, it's happening in the Midwest and the West Coast, all over the country. | ||
| And I think that his legacy is more important now than ever. | ||
| But we have to remember that King is helping and collaborating and helping to lead a civil rights movement amidst the unfolding of the Cold War. | ||
| So he is also in an authoritarian age where there are blacklists and books are censored. | ||
| And what's so interesting about King, especially for our time, one of the reasons why King is able to be such a visible symbol of leadership is because he is a Christian minister and a theologian with a PhD from Boston University, | ||
| a seminary degree from Crozier Theological Seminary, and of course an undergraduate degree which he starts at the age of 15 at Morehouse College, which is one of the most important institutions of black education ever created. | ||
| So when we think about King, King is able to speak more truth to power than people who were professional organizers and political activists, people who were connected to labor movements. | ||
| So people like the A. Philip Randolphs and the Claudia Jones and the Paul Robesons and Ella Bakers, all activists who are older than King, who had deep experience, but the Cold War and the authoritarian turn during the Cold War had really silenced those voices. | ||
| Just like we have ICE now on the streets of Chicago and New York and Austin and other places, we had folks who were deported during the Cold War, people like Claudia Jones and the writer and activist C. L. R. James, many others. | ||
| Paul Robeson's passport was revoked unconstitutionally and illegally. | ||
| W.E.B. Du Bois, the first black PhD at Harvard and the co-founder of the NAACP, he was disallowed from traveling overseas during the Cold War. | ||
| So this authoritarian turn that the United States has taken when we think about what's happening in our streets and also globally Venezuela, talk of taking Greenland. | ||
| This is something that King faced in his own time. | ||
| And certainly King becomes the most articulate spokesperson and critic of the Vietnam War by the mid-1960s, alongside of other activists like Stokely Carmichael and Ella Baker and others. | ||
| So in certain ways, King's legacy is more resonant now than ever. | ||
| And this idea of the fierce urgency of now is more resonant than ever. | ||
| And we have to remember that Dr. King is an activist who was imprisoned and put in jail. | ||
| One of the most important pieces of philosophy in American history is Dr. King's letter from Birmingham Jail, because that letter is a theory of justice. | ||
| And what does a just society look like? | ||
| And what should people who are willing to sacrifice for a just society do, right? | ||
| And in letter from Birmingham Jail, he excoriates not just the racial segregationists, but he excoriates those who presume themselves to be allies of the civil rights movement by saying that they are not being passionate enough in trying to end the moral evil of racial segregation and injustice and white supremacy. | ||
| And he's talking about young people who are being arrested in Birmingham. | ||
| And he says in that letter from Birmingham Jail that one day these young people are going to be hailed as heroes for bringing us all back to those great wells of democracy dug deep by the founding fathers. | ||
| So when we think about King and that legacy, we have to remember that King is incarcerated dozens of times. | ||
| King fears for his life in prison. | ||
| And in 1960, he's arrested in Georgia and then taken hours away to rural Georgia. | ||
| And if not for the intervention of Harris Wofford and Bobby Kennedy and Senator John F. Kennedy on his way to being president, King would not have been released. | ||
| And it is John F. Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy and Harris Wofford. | ||
| It is that intervention that leads Martin Luther King Sr. to say that, you know, he's for JFK and the black vote 70% for JFK in the 1960 election. | ||
| So King was somebody who was imprisoned. | ||
| He's somebody who was incarcerated. | ||
| We never think of King as a prison intellectual, as somebody who was a political prisoner in the context of the United States. | ||
| And so that legacy is more important now than ever when people are being whisked off of streets. | ||
| ICE agents are shooting American citizens in the head. | ||
| All in public view, King would have found this obviously abominable and deplorable, but King really faced an authoritarian United States that he was trying to bring into a different light, which he called the beloved community. | ||
| Let me invite viewers to call the program if they want to ask questions of our guests. | ||
| 202748-8000 for Democrats, Republicans, 202-748-8001, and Independents. | ||
| 202748-8002. | ||
| Professor, it was a year ago about where the president, during his inaugural address, it was on Martin Luther King's holiday, referenced the leader. | ||
| I want to play a little bit of what he had to say back then and then get your thoughts now. | ||
| To the black and Hispanic communities, I want to thank you for the tremendous outpouring of love and trust that you have shown me with your vote. | ||
| We set records and I will not forget it. | ||
| I've heard your voices in the campaign and I look forward to working with you in the years to come. | ||
| Today is Martin Luther King Day and his honor, this will be a great honor, but in his honor we will strive together to make his dream a reality. | ||
| We will make his dream come true. | ||
| Professor, that was a year ago. | ||
| Your thoughts as of today. | ||
| Well, I mean, I think Dr. King, Donald Trump is not the first person to try to subvert Dr. King's legacy by in Dr. King's name proposing policies and proposing a vision of American society that is antithetical to everything that Dr. King stood for. | ||
| So he's not the first person. | ||
| And one of the ironies or paradoxes of American history is that the King holiday was ushered in by many people who were political adversaries of Dr. King. | ||
| It was signed into law in November of 1983 by Ronald Reagan, who was a political opponent of Dr. King, who thought that King was a communist, but knew in the context of 1983 that if he vetoed the holiday, that Congress in 1983 would have overridden the veto. | ||
| So Donald Trump, what Donald Trump is saying about Dr. King is really mendacious. | ||
| It's false. | ||
| But King faced that in his own time. | ||
| He used to talk about meeting with big city mayors who, once he won the Nobel Prize, Nobel Peace Prize in 64, he was Time Magazine's man of the year at the end of 63. | ||
| He'd get all these meetings, but they still practiced segregation in their city. | ||
| So they were willing to get a photo op with King at the height of his popularity, 1963, 64, 65, but it was really business as usual in terms of racial segregation. | ||
| And it's important for us to remember that King was extraordinarily unpopular at the end of his life because he was an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War. | ||
| He called for a poor people's campaign, a multi-racial poor people's campaign that he started in Marks, Mississippi. | ||
| And he connects with poor whites and Hispanic and Indigenous and African-American and folks across the racial and ethnic spectrum to lead a campaign for dignity and citizenship for all Americans, including a guaranteed living wage and income. | ||
| He advocated for health care and decent housing and the end of violence, both domestically and internationally. | ||
| So King is a very difficult figure for all presidents to genuinely embrace because the presidency in many ways contravenes ideas that King held sacred, right? | ||
| Including King wouldn't have supported drone strikes and drone wars. | ||
| He wouldn't have exported, supported extra-legal renditions or enhanced interrogation that's really just another name for torture. | ||
| So all presidents really have a hard time truly supporting Dr. King, but certainly in the case of the current president and the authoritarian turn that the country has taken, the turn towards open racism and white supremacy that the country has taken, that administration and the president who supports that certainly cannot in good faith claim to be a supporter of Dr. King or his legacy. | ||
| Let's hear from some viewers. | ||
| This is from David, David, in Washington State, independent line for our guest, Peneil Joseph of the University of Texas at Austin. | ||
| That administration. | ||
| Paula, you're on, go ahead, please. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, I was wondering how come every time black people get together, start a city, and be thriving together, no problems, everybody's working economically, it's coming together, then the white people show up, burn it down, kill the people, men, women, kids, and burn the town down and kill everybody, and then want to say that we don't want to live with them, but they don't want to live with us, and we really don't care. | |
| We can live by ourselves and thrive. | ||
| We don't need them. | ||
| It's been proven. | ||
| But every time we start something, they want to kill it, bury it, burn it, or flood it. | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| Why can't white people just get along with everybody? | ||
| They are not supremists. | ||
| I mean, supreme to anybody. | ||
| And if they really want to smoke, they're going to end up getting it from every nationality on the planet. | ||
| Okay, that's David in Washington State. | ||
| Professor, what do you think of that assessment? | ||
| Well, I think historically there have been racial pogroms against African Americans. | ||
| Really, we can go back to Reconstruction and Hamburg Massacre, Mississippi, South Carolina, New Orleans, 1866, 1875, Wilmington, North Carolina, 1898. | ||
| And certainly there were black sections of East St. Louis, Elaine, Arkansas, Atlanta, very infamously, Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921, Rosewood, Florida, in 1923, | ||
| that were terrorized by both law enforcement, vigilante groups that really felt jealous of black success and started rumors, created false accusations, and murdered at times hundreds of people. | ||
| So that has happened historically. | ||
| I think that in our current 2026, we should think about those historic racial pogroms as a metaphor for efforts to destabilize and efforts to turn back visions of black progress, right? | ||
| So the backlash that we're seeing, a president who's saying the Civil Rights Act of 1964, one of the signal achievements of America in its quest for multiracial democracy, unfairly discriminated against white people, a Supreme Court that really turns back the Voting Rights Act starting in 2013 with the Shelby v. Holder decision. | ||
|
Systematic Efforts vs. Dignity
00:06:26
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| What we're seeing is that those racial programs are a metaphor for efforts that are systematic, historic, and unfortunately enduring to really end any aspect of black people achieving full citizenship. | ||
| But I would add that paralleling those efforts are those efforts to achieve dignity and citizenship institutionally, politically, culturally. | ||
| So, we do, we should remember, and I would remind the caller that so much of American history is divided into a narrative war between supporters of Reconstruction, and we think about Reconstruction after the Civil War, this idea of multiracial democracy, dignity, and citizenship, not just for black people, but for all citizens, versus a vision of redemption. | ||
| And when we think about the Redeemer South was the white supremacist South. | ||
| It was vicious, it was violent, it was mendacious, but it also was self-righteous, righteous, and narcissistic and pathological. | ||
| And that Redeemer South continues into the 21st century. | ||
| It's more than just the Confederate flag, Pedro. | ||
| It's more than people screaming the N-word. | ||
| It's the replacement theory. | ||
| It's anti-Semitic. | ||
| It's saying that the Jews did it. | ||
| It's saying that the blacks are unworthy. | ||
| It's saying that Muslims are terrible people. | ||
| It's xenophobic. | ||
| It's deeply misogynistic. | ||
| It hates women. | ||
| It practices misogynoir. | ||
| It hates black women. | ||
| It's deeply homophobic and queer phobic and transphobic. | ||
| It doesn't want us to read and learn. | ||
| It's censoring. | ||
| It's against freedom of speech except for its own hate speech and mendacity. | ||
| So those are the twin parallels, the twin routes of American history. | ||
| But we have to remember it's not just one or the other. | ||
| And I would argue in our own time, we actually have more Reconstructionists in the United States and around the world than we ever had before. | ||
| It doesn't mean that they've been able to consolidate political power, but I'd say we have more in our own time than we've ever had before, which should give all of us hope. | ||
| This is from North Carolina, Stephanie, Republican Line. | ||
| Hi there, you're on. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hi, good morning, Pedro. | |
| Good morning, Mr. Joseph. | ||
| I really appreciate you for being here with us today. | ||
| I do want to push back a little bit, though, and I'm kind of nervous. | ||
| So my question is, especially to you, sir, since you're the person on the TV right now, obviously, I guess you're a black man as well. | ||
| And I find it, you know, almost frustrating that we have a lot of successful black people in this country. | ||
| And especially today, with it being Martin Luther King Day, there are a lot of successful black people on the TV. | ||
| And I find it funny that while y'all are being successful and living a successful life, you're also telling other black people that this country hates them. | ||
| So what I would like to know is if this country is so against them, then how did you get so successful? | ||
| And I also think that instead of y'all constantly pushing this narrative of inequality and injustice, perhaps you should be pushing a narrative of how you yourself became so successful and then distributing that information inside of your black community. | ||
| My second question is: do you live in a predominantly white community or do you live in the ghetto? | ||
| Sorry to leave. | ||
| Okay, caller, let me leave it there. | ||
| Dr. Joseph, go ahead. | ||
| Well, I'll answer the first one because I don't think if somebody lives in a black community that it's somehow a ghetto. | ||
| Well, I think we do both. | ||
| I think that America has never been just one thing. | ||
| It's multiple things simultaneously, and it's still an unfinished experiment. | ||
| So I think you can talk about the areas of institutional racism, injustice, discrimination that are happening all around us when we think about what's happened with efforts to ban black history, | ||
| ban really the teaching of Tony Morrison, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King Jr., ban the teaching of Plato and Socrates all across the United States, including in states like Texas and Florida and others. | ||
| I think you can, and Dr. King reminds us that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. | ||
| I think you can do that and simultaneously talk about the areas of progress that the United States has made. | ||
| And that's what I actually, I don't know if the caller had heard, but that's what I was alluding to earlier when I talked about Reconstructionists versus redemptionists. | ||
| I think one of the saddest parts of our current period is the fact that so much of the progress that had been made during America's second Reconstruction, and this is the period from arguably 1954 to 1968, where folks like Dr. King are right in the spotlight, but it's also the period of the Brown versus Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas desegregation decision. | ||
| It's Little Rock Central High School. | ||
| It's the lynching of Emmett Till. | ||
| It's Dr. King, but really led by Rosa Parks and E.D. Nixon and others, the Montgomery Improvement Association and the 382-day Montgomery bus boycott in 1955-56. | ||
| And when we think about all that, the creation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC, in 1960 and the sit-in movements, the Freedom Rides, James Meredith becoming the first black student in Ole Miss and the rioting that occurs in September of 1962 there, and then certainly 1963, and I've written a recent book on 1963 about the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, | ||
|
Part Of This Heroic Period
00:09:41
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| but the Birmingham movement, the March on Washington, John F. Kennedy's finest moment as president, June 11th, 1963, coming out firmly in support of civil rights, the activism of Medgar Evers and eventually the assassination of Medgar Evers, the powerful moral witness of James Baldwin, the fire next time. | ||
| These are all parts of this heroic period of the civil rights movement and then culminating in the 1964 Civil Rights Act being passed on July 2nd by Lyndon Johnson and the Voting Rights Act in 1965 being passed on August 6th. | ||
| We live in a time where those victories, which were really victories for all Americans, unlike what the president has said about the Civil Rights Act, Civil Rights Act bars discrimination based on race and gender and other attributes for all Americans. | ||
| So these were not acts that were passed in legislation that was passed for black people. | ||
| The narrative says that. | ||
| The narrative is erroneous. | ||
| Black people led a movement for dignity and citizenship for all people. | ||
| It was a movement for multi-racial democracy. | ||
| But because of the country's original sin of racial slavery and the distorted worldview that the country has had ever since, people still think about the civil rights movement as something that was just for black people. | ||
| The only reason we have an Americans with Disabilities Act, the only reason why we have gay marriage, the only reason why we have so many different things for so many different people all across the United States is because of that movement. | ||
| And that was a movement for multiracial democracy that started even before the Civil War. | ||
| So black people have been the greatest purveyors of democracy that the country has ever seen, more than the founders, right? | ||
| Black people have been the greatest purveyors of dignity than anyone in the history of the Republic. | ||
| Black people have been the greatest purveyors of citizenship, a compassionate, ethical, morally centered citizenship for all people, but especially as Dr. King articulated, the least of these, because black people are coming out of a radical Christian tradition in the United States that even during racial slavery, black people believed in abolition democracy. | ||
| They believed in freedom and liberation for all people, especially those who were marginalized and considered underdogs in society. | ||
| Dr. Joseph, I do want to get another call in, if I may. | ||
| This is Loretta in Ohio Democrats line. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| You're on with our guest. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, good morning, Professor. | |
| Good morning, America. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| I just wanted, I wanted to say that I saw the QA program with Peter Slin, and you were absolutely fantastic. | ||
| And I wrote Peter a post on X and I let him know that I thought that that program was great. | ||
| It was absolutely wonderful. | ||
| But I do have a question. | ||
| We were watching a Black History program on PBS, and my nephew asked, He said, Auntie, how did Black people get like this? | ||
| How come we can't have and go places and do things like the white people can? | ||
| And I really didn't know how to answer him, but the question stuck with me. | ||
| And I kind of looked things up and did a little research. | ||
| And I found, and they don't talk about this, but the average Black foundational person is an original Black Native Indian. | ||
| And Black people, the Black Indians, were reclassified. | ||
| They took away our identity. | ||
| And they made us, first they made us Negroes, then they made us color, then they made us black. | ||
| No, then we were African Americans, and then we were black. | ||
| So we've had four or five different classifications as a people. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Caller, thanks for watching the QA program, which you could still watch. | ||
| Dr. Joseph, go ahead. | ||
| Yeah, so when it comes to Black America and where we're from, we're a melting part and we're part of the African diaspora. | ||
| So most of the original black people who came from West Africa were transplanted in the South during the transatlantic slave trade. | ||
| But there was also other immigration from the Caribbean and West Africa as well. | ||
| And I would push back against the idea of just foundational black Americans. | ||
| My people historically are from Haiti, and you had Haitians who fought in the Battle of Savannah during the Revolutionary War. | ||
| So, this idea that somehow unless you can trace your ancestry back to racial slavery, you're not part of this struggle is completely erroneous and false. | ||
| We are, like Stokely Carmichael Kwame Touré reminded us, we are all African people. | ||
| We are African, Caribbean, and yes, we're Black American, but we're part of this African diaspora that has struggled for dignity and citizenship for all of us. | ||
| So, black people were inspired by the Haitian Revolution. | ||
| Haiti in 1804 becomes the first independent black republic in the history of the Western world. | ||
| It goes from a colony of enslaved Africans and Caribbeans in 1791 to a republic of black citizens, right? | ||
| So, that's extraordinary. | ||
| So, there's no way. | ||
| Frederick Douglass understood this, and so did Denmark VC and Nat Turner and Gabriel Prosser and so many different others. | ||
| So, we have to think transatlantically. | ||
| And certainly, the folks like Marcus Garvey, Amy Jacques Garvey, Coretta Scott King, Dr. Betty Shabazz, these are black women and men who understood that black identity was global in scope. | ||
| It was transatlantic, it was cosmopolitan, it was international. | ||
| And that's what I would tell your nephew, that this whole idea of this was done to us, why did this happen to us? | ||
| This happened because of extractive capitalism. | ||
| It happened because extractive capitalism racialized black people. | ||
| It did to indigenous people as well, but it used black people as collateral. | ||
| It used us as mortgage securities. | ||
| There's a great book, Sven Beckert's Empire of Cotton, but I would also say read Vince Brown's Tax Revolt, you know, and that really allows us to look at race and capitalism and why black people historically and contemporaneously continue to be exploited in terms of capitalism. | ||
| We continue to be super exploited, not just for our labor, but for what we represent. | ||
| So, police departments, law enforcement, the culture industry with music, sports, we are always super exploited, whether it's through lure or through loathing. | ||
| Sometimes we're super exploited by saying, hey, black people are hip and they've got the fashion and the style. | ||
| And then the kids on TikTok and Instagram use it, but they use it in a way they whiten it up and lighten it up and make a bunch of money because of that. | ||
| Sometimes we're exploited by saying black people are the criminals of society and black people are the folks who are stealing your jobs and stealing everything that you deserve, right? | ||
| And you get people elected and you get law enforcement and you get SWAT teams and you get all kinds of different things because of that. | ||
| So it's important for us to remember that history and that we also have a deeper history. | ||
| It's not just a history of conquest and the transatlantic slave trade. | ||
| We were from West Africa. | ||
| We were from the Caribbean. | ||
| We have an origin story that goes beyond our connection to the West. | ||
| And it's important to acknowledge that and acknowledge the full humanity of that. | ||
| And we are now actors in this idea of not just the United States, but the global society that has emerged in the 21st century. | ||
| And it's important for us to own that and be proud of the history that we are connected to because we've shaped that in ways that have enhanced the dignity, the citizenship, the humanity of the entire world. | ||
| Even paradoxically, a lot of times we are accused of having done just the opposite. | ||
|
Holding On To Truth
00:02:22
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| So it's important for us to hold on to that truth, especially in times like these, which are anti-fact, which are anti-history. | ||
| And when you're anti-fact and anti-history, you become misanthropic. | ||
| You become anti-human. | ||
| And I think that's the lesson of Dr. King. | ||
| It's the lesson of James Baldwin. | ||
| It's the lesson that we need to hold on to now more than ever. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| This is Peniel Joseph of the University of Texas at Austin, the founding director of the Center for Study of Race and Democracy. | ||
| He has a book, Freedom Season: How 1963 Transformed American Civil Rights Revolution, that full interview on that book on our book TV channel if you want to check it out there. | ||
| Dr. Joseph, thanks for your time and thanks for participating today. | ||
| Thank you, Pedro. | ||
|
unidentified
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On Tuesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson is in London to deliver remarks to the U.K. Parliament. | |
| He'll be the first U.S. Speaker of the House to address Parliament. | ||
| Watch our America 250 coverage live at 4:30 a.m. Eastern on C-SPAN, C-SPAN now, our free mobile app, and online at c-span.org. | ||
| C-SPAN, Democracy Unfiltered. | ||
| We're funded by these television companies and more, including Comcast. | ||
| The flag replacement program got started by a good friend of mine, a Navy vet, who saw the flag at the office that needed to be replaced and said, wouldn't this be great if this was going to be something that we did for anyone? | ||
| Comcast has always been a community-driven company. | ||
| This is one of those great examples of the way we're getting out there. | ||
| Comcast supports C-SPAN as a public service, along with these other television providers, giving you a front-row seat to democracy. | ||
| The National Action Network hosted its annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day legislative breakfast in Washington, D.C. Speakers included the Reverend Al Sharpton, Martin Luther King Jr. III, former Attorney General Eric Holder, and former DNC Chair Donna Brazil. | ||
|
An Hour And 45 Minutes
00:00:35
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|
unidentified
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They reflect on Dr. King's legacy in civil rights activism and how it connects to the social and political challenges the U.S. is facing today. | |
| This is an hour and 45 minutes. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Oh, that sounded like 2025. | ||
| I said good morning. | ||
| Wonderful. | ||
| Well, I'm clearly not Reverend Al Sharpton, but my name is Ebony Riley. | ||
| I serve as his senior vice president. | ||