BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. Wednesday marked the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King's assassination. He died just days after joining sanitation workers in Memphis who were demanding living wages. This was a year after King's call for an end to the Vietnam War, four years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and three years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

Ten years earlier, when he was still in his 20s, Martin Luther King, Jr. was a prominent preacher, an activist, a family man and also an advice columnist for Ebony magazine. Writer Mychal Denzel Smith, exploring the legacy of King as a role model of black masculinity for Atlantic magazine, found that readers asked the civil rights leader for advice about everything from race relations to marriage problems and that the exchanges revealed as much about King as his readers.

MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH: There are [LAUGHS] people writing in to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., asking for typical advice-column stuff about their relationships.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: They’re like messages preserved in amber from the ‘50s. I’m going to read one of these letters: “My husband is having an affair with a woman in our housing project. He promised to stop but he’s still seeing her. We have children and I don't believe in divorce but I cannot and will not share him. What must I do?” And part of King's advice reads, “Since the other person is so near, you might study her and see what she does for your husband that you might not be doing. Do you spend too much time with the children in the house and not pay attention to him? Are you careful with your grooming? Do you nag?”

Now, let me correct myself. This isn’t preserved in amber from the ‘50s. This is preserved in amber from the 1890s!

MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH: [LAUGHS] To be as fair as possible to Dr. King, there are a couple of men who do write in to him asking for relationship advice, and his first reaction is to advise self-analysis. The problem I see here, though, is he gives lots of advice that is drawing on the sexist ideas about who women should be and what housewives should be and ignoring any ideas around gendered labor that happen to exist. He’s asking, do you spend too much time with the children? Where are the children supposed to go?

[BROOKE LAUGHS]

Dr. King doesn’t seem to think about this, right?

BROOKE GLADSTONE: With, as you note, some exceptions, for instance, birth control.

MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH: This is true. Someone wrote in asking him whether or not he considered birth control sinful and King said that he does not consider it sinful and that women should not be just breeding machines. And so, he does have some understanding of women as people who can make their own choices and make their own decisions, but the advice that he gives to a woman who says that her husband's a terror, I mean, he’s just like, well, have you asked yourself [LAUGHS] about yourself lately?

[BROOKE LAUGHS]

What have you done to produce this behavior in him? That he doesn't extend that thoughtfulness about birth control and about women's rights and about women's autonomy to this relationship advice seems maybe as like writing himself his own past, right, knowing what we know about King and his own philandering, to say, it is not my own fault.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So why did you begin your column with the advertisement from Jet and the column from Ebony?

MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH: He had been on the national scene for all of two years at this point and Ebony has called him in as a 28-, 29-year-old preacher to help you with “happier living.” We have no reason to believe that Dr. King can help anyone with happier living. He reveals here that maybe he wasn’t exactly prepared for it.

[BR0OKE LAUGHING]

But there is this idea of him as someone of high moral character.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Sixty years later, it’s still the same.

[BOTH SPEAK/OVERLAP]

MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH: Sixty years later it is exactly the same, and the image of King as a moral authority has been wielded against black youth in all subsequent generations since his assassination.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: You call it a shaming tool.

MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH: Yes. I often describe the civil rights generation of the ‘50s and ‘60s as analogous to the immediate post-World War II period with the greatest generation. The ‘50s and ‘60s are the greatest black generation, right?

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Mm-hmm.

MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH: We look to them as the perfection of what black America could be, and Dr. King stands above them all. We want to say that if you are not living up to the example of King, that he must have died in vain.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Mm-hmm.

MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH: And so, all social ills that are a product of institutional failures and oppression in black America get translated into moral failures, character flaws.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And here are some of the problems with this [LAUGHS] immortalization, as you describe. One is that part of why King was able to connect beyond the black community into the white community is because he adopted white cultural stuff.

MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH: There are cultural mores that would define one as respectable. For men, you dress in a suit. You have a level of education. You come from or have achieved a middle- class status. You have a respectable profession. And you sound the part. King, obviously, had that very preacherly Southern drawl and could draw upon that when necessary, but also he was able to speak in ways that could make people forget he was black. He represents the right kind of black manhood, the one that would open up the White House doors. What that then gets read as is it is the product solely of King's respectable presentation that we are able to enjoy the fruits of the civil rights movement.

Now, that’s certainly part of it. The leaders of that movement were some of the more, quote, unquote, "respectable members of black communities,” right? I mean, this is where the dichotomy gets set up between King and Malcolm X, right? Like, the Nation of Islam --

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Mm-hmm.

MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH: -- very proudly drew their membership from those who had been imprisoned, those who were on the streets, those who were hustlers, those who were involved in prostitution and sex work. If you look at them, [LAUGHS] they look very similar in their presentation, right?

[BOTH SPEAK/OVERLAP]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: They do. One had a bowtie, one had a straight tie.

MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH: Very, very similar, but different backgrounds. Malcolm X does not have a high school degree, did not go to college. He went to prison for seven years. And so, many members of the Nation of Islam are drawn out of those very prisons and ghettos that would have otherwise been discarded as members of society that are disposable. There is also a difference in who -- what we would call like the mainstream civil rights movement -- who was involved in that. These are churchgoin’ folks, the black middle class, for the most part part. Part of what makes it so outrageous, that people would be treated this way, is because they were the right kind of people.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Right. In your article, you mentioned a 2006 episode of The Boondocks, produced by a black illustrator --

MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH: Yes.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: -- in which Dr. King wakes up from a coma four decades after a failed assassination attempt and what he finds are black people, you say, generally being uncouth in a way that King, cartoon or real, would disapprove of.

MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH: What is imagined that he would disapprove of, right?

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Mm-hmm. [AFFIRMATIVE]

MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH: Like, the ultimate King moment of this episode is him standing in front of a sea of black people who are partying in his honor. They’re blasting music, they’re dancing, they’re drinking, they’re having fun. Some people are getting in fights and all of this. And now Aaron McGruder’s vision of King comes to address them and says --

[“RETURN OF THE KING” EPISODE CLIP]:

KING: Will you ignorant [BLEEP] pleeease shut the hell up.

[CROWD STOPS DANCING, GASPS]

MAN IN CROWD: He just said what I think he said?

KING: Is this it? This is what I got all those ass whoopings for? I had a dream once. [[MUSIC UP & UNDER] It was a dream that little black boys and little black girls would drink from the river of prosperity, freed from the thirst of oppression. But, lo and behold, some four decades later, what have I found but a bunch of triflin’, shiftless good-for-nothin’ [BLEEP].

[END CLIP]

MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH: Here is an imagined King who we know is a political actor who spoke forcefully around the ideas of white supremacy or of militarism, of capitalism. We know this King. What Aaron McGruder imagines him coming back to say to black people is that you have failed ‘cause of this deviant behavior that you're participating in.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And you wrote that what happens is that the holy status --

MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH: Mm-hmm.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: -- that he has in black and white culture presents an obstacle to the examination of systems. It isn't his choice of suit that made the impression but his political savvy, his tactics.

MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH: Yeah, you don’t win the Voting Rights Act just because you put on a suit. You do it because you coordinate many different actions over a course of years, facing the violence and using the media to shame America into producing some semblance of justice in the form of legal action. That's not solely because King was a religious man who believed in a divine order and was married and had children. Those are accomplishments of a man but those are not political tactics. They helped but you have to ask to what extent. Those civil rights and, and voting acts of the time period have been easily chipped away at.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Mm.

MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH: This is not to knock how monumental those victories are but if all that you're fighting on is the principles of respectability, you can fight for the right to vote because respectable people should have the right to vote, but does that change the way we view felon voting rights?

BROOKE GLADSTONE: What about these challenges to black masculinity today? If we’re just talking about a style, that was a style in the ‘60s. It kind of reminds me of the Hasidic people in Brooklyn who walk around in clothes from the 19th century. Is that what’s happening here?

MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH: Well --

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Or are there more specific challenges than just clothing?

MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH: It’s not just clothing but the clothing is representative of something. King has a very specific mode of operating as a black man that we've come to believe as the most successful version of what a black man could be. And what kind of masculinity does King represent? Not just the respectable suit-and-tie preacher religious, all of that, but he is a cisgender hetero man, right?

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Right.

MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH: And so, you're sending a message to anyone that is not that that you are a failure of black manhood. You can talk about King being a father but also he spent a lot of time away from his family and his children --

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Mm-hmm.

MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH: -- because he was committed to the struggle. There are just so many disconnects between who King actually was and then the idealized version of him that are used to then prescribe a certain sense of black masculinity that all the rest of us are supposed to live up to.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I can't think of an analogous person in the white community --

[BOTH SPEAK/OVERLAP]

MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH: No one’s like: if you’re not George Washington, [LAUGHS] you are a failure, right? [LAUGHING] Only King is used in such a way to chastise black youth. There have been real political consequences. You can go back to the 1980s and 1990s. Credit where credit due, civil rights leaders of that period were calling for things other than policing and, and incarceration.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Mm-hmm. [AFFIRMATIVE]

MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH: But they also used the rhetoric of failing to live up to King's dream to chastise black youth who were involved in violent crimes and in the drug trade and then turned around and used that same rhetoric of failure to live up to King's dream and imposing the draconian laws that turn into mass incarceration.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: The same people?

MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH: Same people. Eric Holder as attorney general of Washington, DC at the time, he delivers a MLK Day speech where he’s talking about black-on-black violence, the failure of our people to live up to that example.

[CLIP]:

ATTORNEY GENRRAL ERIC HOLDER: And where kids who have not yet reached their teenage years already have sworn allegiance to a life of violence and a life of crime. I am dissatisfied that in Washington today more than 2,500 young people are active gang members. So yes, like Dr. King and like many of you, I am dissatisfied.

MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH: He has the ability to then enforce laws that stop black motorists in the pursuit of the drug trade --

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Mm-hmm.

MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH: -- and illegal weapons. He’s turned the police and the state on black folks in the name of King.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Just before King's assassination in 1968, you note he participated in a sanitation workers strike --

MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH: Mm-hmm. [AFFIRMATIVE]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: -- in Memphis. And part of what set off this strike was two sanitation workers getting mashed up in a trash compactor.

MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH: Mm-hmm. [AFFIRMATIVE]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And it just seemed so inhuman, like they didn't -- care. The striking workers held up a sign saying “I Am A Man.”

[1968 CLIPS]:

JAMES DOUGLAS, STRIKE PARTICIPANT: [The signs we were carrying] said “I Am a Man." And we were going to demand to have the same dignity and same courtesy any other citizens of Memphis has.

DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.: We are saying that we are determined to be men. We are saying that we are determined to be men….We are saying that we are God's children.

[CROWD RESPONSES/END CLIP]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: These signs would mean something different in 2018?

MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH: Yeah. So when we’re looking at it now through this lens, we’re looking at people who think being a man is tied to their economic futures because they've been taught that a man is the head of household and that part of the rights that are being denied to them are not just the rights of being a worker who makes a living wage but the rights of a man to make a fair wage and provide for his family. So when we’re talking about examining these moments and trying to tease out what's useful and what's not, we have to divorce the very real rights that they were fighting for from the way in which they understood those rights, and that being so closely tied to their rights as men.

And this is drawn from a lot of King's writing, as well. He couched these rights very much in a masculine framework, that black folks were -- and poor folks were being denied the dignity of manhood the black man has been denied and the black man has been subject to and the black man, this, and the black man has seen his woman degraded and [LAUGHS], you know.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Yeah.

MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH: It’s just this idea that the worst aspects of what racism does is deny men the right to be men. [LAUGHS] There are a number of different things to just like unpack their racism. One affects black women, [LAUGHS] as well, right? But then also what does being a man mean? What are the rights that you think are being denied to you and are what you perceive as rights, not oppressive to someone else?

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So if the image of King has been misused, that we've deflected our focus not just from the systems that are responsible for endemic racism but even from his own strategies and tactics that enabled him through relentless effort to make some change in the society and that it’s oppressive to young people today --

MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH: Mm-hmm.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: -- what do you propose?

MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH: I am okay with taking a vacation from King, I mean, across the board, everyone. Every now and then, we like have a discourse around King and what King really meant and who King really was and the radical King and we need to rescue his image, but I think that he's too far gone at this point. It can be too overbearing and oppressive and not productive to continue to labor over arguing King's meaning. I think we can take a break from King.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And you said across the board.

MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH: Across the board.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So the white community --

MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH: Everyone.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: -- should really --

MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH: Everyone.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: -- give King a break, as well. You’re not saying we should stop recognizing him once a year on the holiday, are you?

MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH: [LAUGHS] Maybe for a little while.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: What?!

MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH: Maybe for a little while.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Um --

MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH: Maybe we need to let go completely for a little while. I don't think that it's productive. The holiday has been turned into the day of service. It’s like, go to a homeless shelter and feed people.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Mm-hmm.

MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH: That’s not the same thing as transforming a system so that there are no homeless people and there are no people that can't afford food. I'm saying maybe we do just need to let go of him for a time, to discuss the future of our politics without drawing upon him to inform it.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: How long?

MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH: Fifteen, 20 years.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: How about masculinity, you think we should put that aside too?

MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH: We should get rid of that too.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS] Mychal, thank you so much.

MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH: Thank you.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Michal Denzel Smith is the author of Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching: A Young Black Man’s Education.

[MUSIC/MUSIC UP & UNDER]

That’s it for this week’s show. On the Media is produced by Alana Casanova-Burgess, Jesse Brenneman, Micah Loewinger and Leah Feder. We had more help from Jon Hanrahan, Philip Yiannopoulos and Isaac Napell. Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineer this week was Sam Bair. Katya Rogers is our executive producer. Jim Schachter is WNYC’s vice-president for news. Bassist composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. And, by the way, why don’t you sign up for our newsletter? It has more of everything you love about On the Media, and it’s written by our brilliant producers. Just go to onthemedia.org.

Bob Garfield will be back next week, I promise. I’m Brooke Gladstone.