Douglass×Jr.

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   Welcome back to Reborn Radio. Up next on TITANS: Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr., on Supreme Court paves the way for largest-ever drop in Black representation in Congress.
2. 00:11
   Frederick Douglassshare moment

   We have just received word. The Supreme Court has weakened the Voting Rights Act. The result, they tell us, will be the largest drop in Black congressional representation in the nation's history.
3. 00:25
   Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

   The largest drop. Ever.
4. 00:27
   Frederick Douglassshare moment

   Yes.
5. 00:27
   Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

   Frederick, I spent years of my life on that Act. Selma. The bridge. John Lewis's skull fractured on that bridge. We marched so that Act could be written in 1965. And now—
6. 00:40
   Frederick Douglassshare moment

   And now they dismantle it with the very institution we were told would protect it. The Court. The law. The Constitution itself.
7. 00:48
   Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

   I believed in the law. I staked my entire methodology on it. Nonviolent direct action to expose injustice, yes, but always to appeal to the law, to the Constitution, to make real what was promised.
8. 01:02
   Frederick Douglassshare moment

   I know that belief. I held it once with both hands. Do you know what I wrote in 1852? 'The Constitution is a glorious liberty document.' I meant it. I had to mean it.
9. 01:15
   Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

   Had to?
10. 01:16
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    If the Constitution was irredeemable, then what were we? What could we become? So I read it as an antislavery document. I argued it could be made to serve freedom. But Martin, the Court that existed in my time—the Taney Court—declared in Dred Scott that a Black man had no rights which a white man was bound to respect.
11. 01:39
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    And we overturned that. Amendments. Reconstruction. The Civil Rights Act. The Voting Rights Act. We built layer upon layer of protection.
12. 01:49
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    And they are peeling it back. Layer by layer.
13. 01:51
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    So what do we tell people? That the law is a lie? That the courts cannot be trusted?
14. 01:56
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    We tell them the truth. The law is not a sanctuary. It is a battlefield. Every right we have ever claimed, we claimed by making the powerful more afraid of unrest than of justice.
15. 02:08
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    But Frederick, that sounds like—
16. 02:10
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    Like what?
17. 02:11
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    Like despair. Like abandoning the very framework that makes a multiracial democracy possible.
18. 02:17
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    I do not counsel despair. I counsel memory. I remember what power respects. It does not respect prayers. It does not respect logic. It respects pressure. It respects the prospect of disruption.
19. 02:31
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    I know about disruption. Birmingham. The buses. The sit-ins. But disruption was always in service of law, of forcing America to meet its own stated ideals.
20. 02:41
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    And it worked. For a time.
21. 02:43
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    For a time.
22. 02:44
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    Tell me, Martin. When you stood on those steps in 1963 and spoke of the promissory note, the check that came back marked insufficient funds—did you believe the bank was fundamentally sound?
23. 02:58
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    I believed it could be made sound. I had to believe that. The alternative was chaos, was violence, was the very thing I spent my life arguing against.
24. 03:07
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    And yet here we are. The Court has ruled. Congress will be whiter. The maps will be drawn to ensure it. What does your nonviolence do in the face of a violence that wears a robe?
25. 03:18
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    It endures. It organizes. It builds coalitions. Frederick, I am not naive. I knew by the end of my life that the arc bends slowly, that it doesn't bend by itself. But abandoning the framework means abandoning the possibility of a beloved community.
26. 03:33
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    I do not ask anyone to abandon anything. I ask them to see clearly. The Court is not neutral. It has never been neutral. In my time it served slaveholders. In yours it dismantles your life's work. Clarity is not despair.
27. 03:55
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    Clarity without hope is despair by another name.
28. 03:58
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    Hope without power is prayer. And prayer did not free me. Frederick Bailey became Frederick Douglass because he fought his way out. He read, yes. But he also fought.
29. 04:12
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    And I marched. And I was stabbed. And I was jailed thirty times. I know what it costs. But if we tell people the system is irredeemable, we hand the future to those who want exactly that conclusion.
30. 04:23
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    Then tell me what you would have them do. Right now. Today. The maps are being drawn.
31. 04:30
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    Organize. In every district. Challenge every line. Register every voter they're trying to erase. Make the cost of this decision visible and unbearable.
32. 04:40
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    Yes. That is exactly right. Make the cost unbearable. Not through the law alone, but through the kind of power that makes lawmakers afraid.
33. 04:51
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    Afraid of losing elections. Afraid of social pressure. Not afraid of violence.
34. 04:56
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    I never counseled violence. I counseled self-defense and the refusal to cooperate with one's own degradation. There is a difference.
35. 05:03
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    There is. And it's a narrow difference, and it matters.
36. 05:06
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    It does. But so does this: they have taken representation from people who bled for it. They have done so legally. And the question is whether legality is enough to make it right.
37. 05:19
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    No. It's not enough. It was never enough. That's why we marched.
38. 05:23
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    Then we agree.
39. 05:24
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    We agree that the fight continues. We disagree, perhaps, on how much faith to place in the institutions while we fight.
40. 05:31
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    Place your faith where you must. I will place mine in the people who refuse to be erased. They are the only constant I have ever trusted.
41. 05:40
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    And I will place mine in those same people, and in the belief that they can transform even a broken system. Because if we can't, then what was Selma for?
42. 05:50
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    Selma was for this. For the fact that we are still here. Still speaking. Still insisting. That is not nothing.
43. 05:58
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    No. It's not nothing. But it should be more by now.
44. 06:01
    Frederick Douglassshare moment

    It should. And it will be. But only if we see clearly what we are up against.
45. 06:07
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    Then let us see clearly. And let us not look away.