REV. DR. WILLIAM J. BARBER II: My father . . . said, “When you feel overwhelmed by your moment, go back and read the moments that people faced that are worse than yours. What courage and hope and truth did they find in that moment?” I go back and I read Henry McNeal Turner and read what Fredrick Douglass was saying. I love to read. That’s the stuff that gets me going and it helps because it keeps you from . . . doing what I see so many people doing today, which bothers me, they say, “We’ve never seen anything like this.”
Theologically, I was taught . . . a phrase: “Is it worse than Calvary?” And that is not to suggest it isn’t bad. It’s just to acknowledge, you’re not the first one. It may not be the worst day—this has happened in history and other folk have somehow come through it. So gird up, get up, and grow up.
I read a lot about Martin, and what intrigued me . . . I was never taught to just throw people away; never taught to say, “This person has nothing to say,” or they were this. I was never taught to accept [that] the one way some people see things is the only way, like, “Malcolm was the evil King” was [OK]. Now, that kind of false history, this is not history at all. But what I was taught to do is read and listen for the humanity of all people.
Maybe now we say [Malcolm] made some mistakes but, man, he was growing. This kid, twenty-something years old, and America kills him. I mean, the system murders him. I’m three years, two years old, when he’s murdered in ’65. We don’t know what Malcolm would’ve become. We do know, even with what he had, he could hold his own, whether he was on Face the Nation or at Harvard.
TIM TYSON: That’s right. Oxford, England.
WB: England. We knew that. And we knew he had this experience, and we knew that if you listen in some ways, you see him coming toward King, with King coming toward him in some way—
TT: King is often misunderstood anyway—
WB: Very much so.
TT: They act like King said, “Light a candle and sing a song and walk out in the rain.”
WB: And sing, “Kumbaya, everything gonna be all right.”
TT: Hell no.