April 4 - Reviving MLK's Poor People's Campaign; The Key Role of MLK's Strategist Bayard Rustin; Will the Tit-for-Tat Tariffs Become a Test of Wills Between Two Authoritarian Leaders

Full Program

Part 1

We begin on this 50^thanniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King and speak with Andra Gillespie, a Professor of Political Science at Emory University whose research focuses on the political leadership of the post-civil rights generation. The author of “The New Black Politician: Cory Booker, Newark and Post-Racial America”, she served as a Martin Luther King Visiting Scholar at MIT and we will discuss the role of the Black Church and religion in the movement that Martin Luther King led and how it compares to the much more secular civil rights movements today like Black Lives Matter, as well as assess the possibility that the Reverend Barber’s Moral Monday Movement in North Carolina can become a national movement as he revives MLK’s Poor People’s Campaign with six weeks of nonviolent civil disobedience across the country planned to begin on May 13, Mother’s Day.

Part 2

Then we  explore further Dr. King’s planned 1968 march on Washington with an interracial army of poor whites, Hispanics, Native Americans and African Americans to demand Congress stop funding the Vietnam War and instead fight the war on poverty. Jerald Podair, a Professor of History at Lawrence University and author of “Bayard Rustin: American Dreamer”, joins us to discuss the key role that MLK’s strategist and advisor Bayard Rustin played in organizing the 1964 March on Washington and the Poor People’s March King was planning before he was assassinated. And we  assess  how much MLK and Bayard Rustin’s Poor People’s manifesto was borrowed from Franklin Roosevelt’s Second Bill of Rights outlined in FDR’s final address in 1944.

Part 3