How to Talk to People - Introducing Holy Week

Episode Date: March 13, 2023

Holy Week: The story of a revolution undone. The assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968, is often recounted as a conclusion to a powerful era of civil rights in America, but how did this hero’s murder come to be the stitching used to tie together a narrative of victory? The week that followed his killing was one of the most fiery, disruptive, and revolutionary, and is nearly forgotten. Over the course of eight episodes, Holy Week brings forward the stories of the activists who turned heartbreak into action, families scorched by chaos, and politicians who worked to contain the grief. Seven days diverted the course of a social revolution and set the stage for modern clashes over voting rights, redlining, critical race theory, and the role of racial unrest in today’s post–George Floyd reckoning. Subscribe and listen to all 8 episodes coming March 14: theatlantic.com/holyweek Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi how-to listeners, this is Rebecca Rashid, producer of the How-To Series here at The Atlantic. And I have a very special guest with me in the studio today. Hey, I'm Van Newkirk, a senior editor with The Atlantic, and most importantly, I'm a podcaster. Hey Van, how's it going? It's going alright. If you've kept track of the podcasts we're making here at The Atlantic, you might already be a fan of floodlines, which fan hosted back in 2020.

Today he has a new show to share with you. It's called Holy Week. Fan, could you tell our how-to listeners what Holy Week is about? Yeah, this show is about the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. Most importantly, it's about the week after that assassination. So in over a hundred cities, thousands of people went out into the streets in uprisings or rebellions or riots, whatever you want to call it, that were the most extensive in America between the Civil War and actually 2020 when George Floyd was killed. And why turned to this specific moment in history?

Well, for me, this time has always been one that's really interesting and worth probing when thinking about the larger arc of American history. So right now we have a sort of standard narrative of the Civil Rights Movement. Things are bad, they got better. Most histories kind of cut things off at like 65 when the Voting Rights Act was passed. There's not a whole lot about what happened after King was killed. And to me, the reason why is because that assassination, the fact that it was killed by a white supremacist, the fact it was killed by white supremacists who worked for George Wallace,

who was then running for president, and the fact that there were all these people, these black folks in the street, who were clearly not satisfied with the gains and progress of the civil rights movement. If you tell that story, then it kind of puts to lie a lot of the things we tell ourselves about progress in America. And why did you choose to tell the story of this week as a podcast? Well, I like podcasting. But one thing I think was so important to capture was the sound of voices, human voices.

I think you can get these emotions in podcasting and radio that either can go unnoticed in film or hard to capture when I'm writing. And so for me, this moment in time, this is a story that I've received most of my life by storytelling, by people doing our equivalent of oral histories today. It's people like my parents, my grandparents who saw it telling me, you know, such as I'd burned in my hometown on April 5th, 1968. And this is what happened. And so I'm trying to honor that tradition of oral history,

storytelling, and also use the strengths of the medium to convey emotion in this incredibly emotionally charged moment. Can you give our how to listeners some Easter egg to listen out for in the series? Hmm. Well, if you enjoyed flood lines, which if you haven't listened to I would also recommend listening to flood lines. One thing that I love doing is I love Describing people's vibes. I'm trying to describe sort of how a person is in my space how I'm interacting with them So there's a guy in there John Burlesmith who was an old radical out of Memphis He went to prison on some charges for his radicalism and

Since then it came out he's been fascinating black history and radical black history and he's like, you know totally got the sort of history and he's like, you know, totally got the sort of barber shop community college like historian vibe. And I say that in the most respectful way possible, that's where I learned all my history. You know, and like, he wears leather can go caps and like trench coats and just totally has his vibe to somebody who's wise in these different ways that I tried to convey. A quick vibe check for how to listeners. What's my vibe right now? Okay, okay.

So how would I describe Becca in a podcast? Well, I guess I can't use the usual podcast, but I feel like you're a listener. You're somebody who like, you know, if you're telling a story, you can tell that you're invested in it and, like, with this sort of a piercing attention. That is a very flattering five-check. You can hear all eight episodes of Holy Week on March 14th and can subscribe to the podcast now. Let's listen to the trailer, shall we, Van?

Yes, we shall. and shoot my little boy and shoot my wife, they shoot me. April 4, 1968 is remembered by many as the end of the civil rights movement. A time of loss. We have been taught about lynchings and school bombings in Rosa Parks. We have been taught about all kinds of stuff, but we were angry. We were angry because a white man killed a prominent person in our life. Grief can have a way of warping the historical lens, trapping us in a moment and overshadowing some of what came before. We played every summer we were outside in the back, baseball, kickball, volleyball, tag,

what came after King's assassination was a week of uprisings that have largely been forgotten. We broke out and went up to 14th Street. What did you see when you got there? Maybe about 2,000 to 3,000 people. What I got up there, they had burned most of everything down. I'm Van Newkeurk, senior editor at The Atlantic. For the past year, I've been talking to people about the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the ensuing unrest that upended so many of their lives.

What I've heard is a story about a break in time, a story that completely changes how I understand the end of the civil rights movement and the entire trajectory of modern America. It's a story about the limits of racial reckoning and about how trauma lives with people through time. It's a story about hope, about grief, about dreams, and about dreams deferred. Had he been able to do what he was planning to do, we would be looking at a different America. From the Atlantic, this is Holy Week. Listen to all eight episodes beginning on March 14th and visit the Atlantic dot com slash Holy Week. dot com slash holy week. you