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The Current Transcript for April 4, 2018

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

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VOICE 1: The caravan doesn't irritate me, the caravan makes me very sad that this can happen to the United States where you have thousands of people that decide to just walk into our country, and we to have any laws that can protect it.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Donald Trump has been stewing and tweeting for days and he's now threatening to position the National Guard along the Mexican border as a caravan of more than a 1,000 Central American migrants has made its way through Mexico toward the U.S. and into a geo-political firestorm that sees the U.S. President threatening Mexico on NAFTA negotiations if it can't stop the caravan and also sees an impatient Trump base demanding that promised wall. All this advocates say as more people are moving back to Mexico from the U.S. than coming over that border. We're on that story today in just a moment. Also today, memories in Memphis.

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VOICE 1: All we have to do is raise our voices up, and appeal to the morality of this nation, and we can make change, and MLK helped me realize that and that's why I'm here.

AMT: It was 50 years ago today that Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis Tennessee. As celebrations of his life and legacy take place across the U.S. we're asking how the once-radical politics of the most famous civil rights activist in US history affects activists today. That's in an hour. And describe a jumpsuit any jumpsuit.

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VOICE 1: So the jumpsuit - I'm wearing the short sleeve version - it has a fly zip and then it has pockets, a couple of tucks in the back, sort of a regular trouser fit.

AMT: It comes in 248 sizes and you can wear it all day, every day, which is exactly what the founders of the Rational Dress Society want you to do: escape the tyranny of fashion, environmental degradation, and endless choice. In half an hour when the politics of fashion offers an uncomfortable fit. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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Trump's tweets stall Central American migrant caravan amidst calls for U.S. asylum process reform

Guests: Delphine Schrank, Andrew Selee

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[Spanish speaking language, through translator]

VOICE 1: We don't care what Mr. Donald Trump says because we are hardworking and humble people. We really are here because we need a new opportunity in life.

VOICE 2: Who are the people that construct the United States? It is us the Latinos the ones that do the heavy work. The only thing we want is an opportunity because in our countries we have bad governments and don't have opportunities.

AMT: Those are two of the thousand-or-so migrants in the caravan that's so angered U.S. President Donald Trump for the past few days. Manuel Flores is from Guatemala and Jose Ernesto Gonzalez is from El Salvador. They're part of the group of Central Americans who have been making their way north, through Mexico, on foot. And it's seemed that for every step they've taken toward the U.S. border, the president has fired off a tweet, decrying his country's “Weak Immigration Policies,” and vowing that the wall with Mexico will be built. Yesterday he upped the ante further linking the caravan to the ongoing NAFTA negotiations and saying he'd send the National Guard to patrol the perimeter. Delphine Schrank has been travelling with the so-called “caravan” since Friday. She is Reuters' chief correspondent for Mexico and Central America. And she is currently in Matías Romero, a Southern Mexican state. Hello.

DELPHINE SCHRANK: Hello.

AMT: What can you tell us about what's happening right now with this caravan of people?

DELPHINE SCHRANK: So it seems that in response to President Trump's barrage of tweets the Mexican government has changed a little bit of its attitude. Up until Sunday I have seen local authorities in Mexico really provide a lot of help to the migrants as they were moving from city to city. At a local level local mayors and police were providing police trucks, buses; I saw ambulances helping the migrants move from city to city or town to town and if they weren't walking — a lot of them are walking… that's correct. But there are a lot of women and children in this caravan as migrants and then as a result of Sunday suddenly the group has been in Matías Romero negotiating passage to the next place, and what happened is Mexican authorities have been registering the migrants to put down their names so that they get travel documents. So visas that gives them a 20 day passage to the country which effectively limits the possibility that they have to keep going as a caravan together because normally that would take about a month to go to the country.

AMT: In other words the Mexican government is bending to some of what Mr. Trump is saying?

DELPHINE SCHRANK: It would seem to be a little bit of that. It seems that they're trying to play both ways. But yeah it seems that they're bowing to pressure from Donald Trump or having to make some kind of statement or action that looks like they're breaking up the caravan.

AMT: Well let's back up a bit. So who is part of this journey? Who are they?

DELPHINE SCHRANK: So they're as you pointed out in your clip over a 1,000 men women and children from Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, from the Central American states to south of Mexico who make their own way over the border to Mexico and gather there together, to join together, and make this journey together because it's much safer if they move as a collective because generally migrants walking alone or doing this journey alone are subject to robbery and extortion and assault and of course the dangers of getting kicked out, getting deported from Mexico. In this instance this is the biggest. These caravans have happened about 2010 once or twice a year. This is the biggest one that they've seen at more than a 1,000 people. It is almost four times the size of what they saw last year. And there are many more Hondurans this year and the reasons for that are pretty varied. But basically everyone I talked to from Honduras has a similar story, an unbelievably dire economic situation and political reasons and many are under lethal threat from gangs. And a lot of this is just compounded by tremendous political unrest there since elections last November that were highly contested and led to the re-election of President Juan Orlando Hernández.

AMT: What does that look like to have about a 1,000 people moving like that and feeling desperate? I mean what have you been seeing as you've been travelling with them?

DELPHINE SCHRANK: I mean it looks pretty desperate. The first day I showed up the whole town square was completely covered and people on the ground. You could see the children and their mothers. People looked starved and very hungry, very dirty. Immediately you could see that they had not had a chance to wash. There's a lot of dehydration. Children crying. Yesterday in Matías Romero they had been laying out in a park or a field next to a rail station for two or three days. Just like a refugee camp you know there are bundles of mattresses and bags strewn all over the place. A family I talked to the children had not eaten in two days because that family had had to flee very quickly in the night and they didn't have money to pay for the little bits of food that people were selling in the park. Up until then they'd been given food. It looks like a refugee camp on the move and a very big one.

AMT: And as you talk to some of the people what stories stand out for you?

DELPHINE SCHRANK: There's a congresswoman on the run who's sort of a rare entity in this body. She's a woman who was in the Honduran National Congress for four years and served until January [unintelligible] and was not paid by her government for 18 months for she says not voting the way of the ruling party and spiralled deeply into debt and had to leave. Yes, these people yesterday I was talking to from El Salvador who became very good friends on the journey. The mother and her two children and her mother had to leave very quickly. She was under threat from a gang. And she is a solo mother of two who ran a little [unintelligible] in her home and she said it's very typical for gangs to come and threaten your life. And next to her was a young man also from Salvador also facing the death threat from a gang who had his own private security guard and they are really really desperate and sad: "Please help us. We're not criminals. The United States we’ll stay in Mexico. We work very hard. We're the ones seeing the people that are criminal and dangerous." And that really stuck with me yesterday.

AMT: And are they at all dissuaded by what President Trump has been saying?

DELPHINE SCHRANK: You know, no. I mean I've talked to a lot of them about this and some of them have messages for Donald Trump along the lines of what I just said: "No we're the hard workers. We're the people that do the dirty in America that we understand they don't do. We'll clean the toilets, we'll clean the pools. That's who we are." And I've heard this repeatedly. The thing I've heard even more than that is look we know that it's difficult to get into the U.S. — and not all of them want to I should specify. We know it's difficult, but the impossible conditions of our country are worse. So the pushback seems to be much more significant.

AMT: And you're staying with them for now?

DELPHINE SCHRANK: For now until the situation changes. The United States president did sort of turn this group into an international incident which affects Mexico also back to Honduras now. So for now yes I'm going to stay with them.

AMT: Well Delphine thank you for your time and for bringing us up to date.

DELPHINE SCHRANK: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

AMT: Delphine Schrank is Reuters chief correspondent for Mexico and Central America. We reached her in Matías Romero, a state in Southern Mexico. In the eyes of many conservative commentators, the migrant caravan represents what they see as the failings of U.S. immigration policy. They say that it shows America is sending the wrong policy signals to would-be immigrants. Dan Stein is the president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform.

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VOICE 1: We have 11 to 13 million people here illegally now, we have an enormous problem. But Trump's rhetoric and his intentions have had an impact on peoples' desire and willingness to move around the world. People make the decision to move, based on very rational expectations of what's going to happen when they get there — what relatives are telling them. If relatives are telling them in this country or what fellow countrymen are telling them that there's interior enforcement, that our immigration authorities are picking people up even if they haven't committed dangerous felonies, I mean that has very dramatic impact on the decision for people to pick up and leave their home country. So what we're starting to see now is these rates starting to pick up again, in part because there's been an unwillingness from congress basically mostly democrats but to meet Trump even a quarter of the way. They want to give Trump any of the promises he made to the American people in the course of his campaign and everybody knows that immigration is one of the top two issues that got trump elected.

AMT: My next guest is going to help us put all of this in context. Andrew Selee is President of the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington think tank that studies the movement of people around the world. He's with us from Washington. Hello.

ANDREW SELEE: Hello. Good to be with you.

AMT: What do you make of the suggestion from Mr. Stein that migrants would be asylum seekers are emboldened because Mr. Trump is stymied in his plans to make immigration tougher?

ANDREW SELEE: He is right there are about 11 million people in the U.S. unauthorized without documents or illegally, however you want to call it. But that's the same number we had 10, 11 years ago. There actually has not been an increase in the number of people coming to the U.S. illegally. And there is a fairly good outflow of people as well. So the number has stayed balanced. You see upticks and downward trends but it's been fairly even. And today actually most people aren't coming across the U.S.-Mexico border. They're overstaying visas. We've actually seen a continued drop of the number of people trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border over the past few years. This seems to be an unusual case with a caravan although it's not clear they were all headed to the U.S. But it is an unusual case. There is a steady stream of Central Americans, Hondurans, Salvadorans, and Guatemalans who continue to try to come into the United States and many of them apply for asylum. But it's not a massive number of people. We did at one point have a massive number if you go back you know 11, 12, 13 years we really had large numbers of people trying to jump across the border. That just isn't the state of affairs today.

AMT: And when we did hear from our last guest that some of those migrants are interested in staying in Mexico if they can to work.

ANDREW SELEE: Yes.

AMT: Now you're actually seeing numbers of Mexicans going back to their original home country, are you not from the United States?

ANDREW SELEE: Very much so. Yeah we've actually seen a drop. The number of Mexicans living unauthorized in the United States has actually dropped steadily over the past 10 years. It's interesting. And the numbers right now of Mexicans trying to cross the border illegally is at about a 50 year low. I mean we haven't seen this few number of people trying to cross illegally in 50 years. The number of Central Americans has gone up since 2014 and then it sort of dropped in 2015. It's been steady. And Central Americans — this is what Trump is referring to — are a special case because so many are applying for asylum and the U.S. asylum system is overloaded. Something similar actually happened in Canada last summer when people were trying to cross from the United States and the numbers weren't huge but it was enough to overload the asylum system. We're seeing this on a larger scale in the U.S. at the border where you know anyone who applies for asylum is entitled to a hearing in immigration court. And that is taking sometimes a year and a half or two years. And if they're a minor, if they're less than 18-years-old or 18 or less, they're actually entitled to be released to a family member while they are awaiting trial. And that's a figure of the law of the United States. It was done to protect children and it was done under President Bush. And it's something that Congress has been reluctant to repeal because they actually feel like you shouldn't put children in prison for two years while they're awaiting trial. And at the same time they haven't figured out a way to make the system speed up so you can have a timely hearing.

AMT: So how does that affect the numbers of people coming over the border?

ANDREW SELEE: You know it is probably an incentive. I mean again we haven't seen massive numbers of people but it probably is an incentive because lots of people you know know that they are entitled to a trial and they will get at least some time in the United States if they get here. But of course the answer to that is to speed up the U.S. immigration system, to put some resources into it, and we haven't seen Congress or the president yet take steps to try and do that effectively. And that's really where the question is. But again you know this is not a national security crisis. It's a humanitarian crisis where you really want to balance out the needs of people who are leaving countries that are very fragile, that have high levels of violence with the laws of the United States, and somewhere in between you know you want to find a just way of dealing with it. So you want to invest in the legal system to process people and determine whether they have a valid asylum application.

AMT: Ok so this morning I'm just reading another tweet from Mr. Trump and it says: “Our Border Laws are very weak while those of Mexico & Canada are very strong. Congress must change these Obama era, and other, laws NOW! The Democrats stand in our way — they want people to pour into our country unchecked....CRIME! We will be taking strong action today.” So if it is not as serious as you say it is not why is he having this reaction now? What's going on?

ANDREW SELEE: You know that we have to speculate on. But I suspect you know President Trump was elected. As Stein said this is one of his top two issues in his campaign. He had a budget negotiation with Congress a couple of weeks ago. He did not get money for a border wall or for significant increased enforcement. And there was a huge backlash in a lot of his base and I think he's being responsive to people who voted for him, who are worried about immigration. It's a minority of the country but it's a big minority and it’s a big part of his political base. But then again the things he's pushing for may or may not actually be the solution. I mean there's no you know a border wall will take 10 years to be built so that probably won't deal with it in the short term and may or may not ever be effective.

AMT: But...

ANDREW SELEE: Even the military which we can talk about is not terribly effective.

AMT: He's talking the National Guard now because there are some restrictions on what you can have the actual military do. But let's go back to the wall because even his muse on Mexico Ann Coulter has been speaking out in the last couple of days saying that those who want the wall they'll even pay for it. But that this was a promise so is this really about optics?

ANDREW SELEE: I think it's optics more than anything else. I mean we have not seen the real change in the numbers of people crossing the border. If anything you know as I said Mexicans are way down. Mexico works with the U.S. very closely actually for better or worse in detaining Central American flows. So they've stayed at a fairly manageable level very similar for the past few years. There isn't something new here that would cause this response except for politics.

AMT: Ok.

ANDREW SELEE: And obviously it is an issue that does matter to people who voted for him. So you know he's looking for ways he can be responsive to something he promised in the campaign. And he has. And one thing one can say for Donald Trump for President Trump is that he has tried to be consistent on certain issues and this is an issue he staked his political future on and he keeps coming back to it.

AMT: Now you did make the point that even though Mexicans aren't coming across the border in the same numbers that those from other Central American countries are coming. How does that fit into the kind of migration you're seeing elsewhere right now? You actually track the global picture. Put that in context for us.

ANDREW SELEE: We do. I mean it is still a much smaller flow than what you see for example from Syria or Afghanistan. I mean this is still a much smaller flow. We're talking about three countries, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras that are all small countries. They're all quite far from the U.S. So the number of people coming across has been low. The overall numbers of people crossing have actually gone down in the past 10 years even with the increase in Central Americans because the number of Mexicans which is from a large country next door have gone down so dramatically. But these are smaller flows. They're very similar in a sense however in that people are fleeing fragile states. They're fleeing places where both they're worried about their economic future but they're also worried about being extorted and killed by local gangs and they don't feel the government can protect them or they're in a situation of open conflict as in the case of Syria. But these are very fragile states and so this is the reason you're seeing people head out, the people who are willing to go two days without eating, because they hope they will be able to give their kids something better in the future. And we don't yet have a response to that. Obviously you can't let everyone in and at the same time you know as a country that has a proud past of receiving asylees and refugees we want to be just with people you know that are leaving a humanitarian crisis.

AMT: You seemed to be telling me though that some of the bigger issues are with those who are already in the United States. It's not really about who's coming over the border today then.

ANDREW SELEE: That's right. And frankly the number in the United States hasn't moved in 10 years. There was a time in the U.S. where you had large numbers of people coming into the country mostly across the U.S.-Mexico border. Right now we really have a population of people without documents which has been stable for many many years. Now one could figure you know there are different ways of approaching this. I think President Trump would say we should go and get rid of as many of those people as possible. You'd find people on the other side saying we should try to legalize as many of those people as possible because they've set down roots in the U.S. But the question really is about what you do with the people who are in the United States right now.

AMT: It's a bit of an irony that a group of people who feel very helpless are really forcing a conversation right now in the United States on this agenda.

ANDREW SELEE: That's right. It's true and we really shouldn't look at this as a national security crisis. It is a humanitarian crisis. That doesn't mean you let everyone in. I mean you know there are reasons why we have an asylum system and we make distinctions on who really has a credible fear of persecution. We have other elements of the law that allow us to let people in who are fleeing situations of extreme violence even if it's not really persecution but you know have real credible fear to return to their own country.

AMT: Right.

ANDREW SELEE: But not everyone is going to get in. But somewhere between letting everyone in and keeping everyone out there is a medium where we can be both just and enforce the law.

AMT: Ok we have to leave it there Andrew Selee thank you.

ANDREW SELEE: Thanks so much.

AMT: Andrew Selee is President of the Migration Policy Institute. He was in Washington. The CBC News is next. Then, put on your jump suits. And keep them on. That's the message from members of the Rational Dress Society who advocate for a world where we flee the tyranny of fashion and all wear jumpsuits. Wait for it right after the news. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and this is The Current.

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These designers think everyone should wear jumpsuits — so they've made one in 248 sizes

Guests: Abigail Glaum-Lathbury, Maura Brewer, Heather Radke

AMT: Hello, I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

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AMT: Still to come,

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[Sound: Cheering]

VOICE 1: My grandfather had a dream that his four little children would not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. I have a dream that enough is enough.

AMT: That's Yolanda Renee King, the granddaughter of Martin Luther King Jr., at the March for Our Lives in Washington last month. Today, the 50th anniversary of the civil rights activist's death, his legacy lives on in America. But have the passing years softened the sharper edges of his once-radical message? That conversation's coming up, in half an hour. But first, what are you wearing?

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AMT: There are fashion emergencies such as having no idea what to wear to that thing on Saturday. And then, there are fashion emergencies such as the United Nations' describing the fashion industry as "an environmental and social emergency." The fashion industry is responsible for producing 20 per cent of global waste water, and 10 per cent of the world's global carbon emissions. And of course, for years the industry has been criticized for paying low wages to workers toiling in sweatshop conditions. Yet we just keep buying the stuff. The average consumer is purchasing 60 per cent more clothes every year than a decade ago. My next guests have a proposal for how to stop the fashion madness. They'd like us all to trade in our wardrobes for one, simple garment: The jumpsuit. Abigail Glaum-Lathbury and Maura Brewer are members of what they call the Rational Dress Society. They've both been wearing jumpsuits exclusively for more than three years. And they're joining me now... Abigail is in Chicago. Maura is in Los Angeles. Hello to you both.

MAURA BREWER: Hi, thank you.

AMT: Jumpsuits...

[Sound: Laughter]

MAURA BREWER: That's right.

ABIGAIL GLAUM-LATHBURY: It's the rational garment.

AMT: Ok so Abigail why did you want to replace your entire wardrobe with the jumpsuit?

ABIGAIL GLAUM-LATHBURY: So we started the Jumpsuit Project about four years ago and it was really born out of a lot of conversations we were having around identity and sort of what it was that we were able to wear as artists specifically. And we started thinking about what kind of garment could you have that would be universal, something that you could wear all the time for every situation and not have to be sort of perpetually thinking about whether or not you were blending in appropriately or what were you know dress codes. And so we started thinking about this idea of a universal garment which then broadened into: well if it's a universal garment for us how could it be a universal garment for everyone.

AMT: And you're wearing jumpsuits today can you tell me what they look like?

ABIGAIL GLAUM-LATHBURY: Sure. So the jumpsuit — I'm wearing the short sleeve version — it has a fly zip. And then it has something called a convertible collar which looks very much like a regular dress shirt collar. And then it has pockets, a couple of tucks in the back, sort of a regular trouser fit.

AMT: Maura what's yours look like?

MAURA BREWER: I'm also wearing the short sleeve this morning and it's a black short sleeve which I have accessorized with a sweater.

AMT: And Maura was it hard to give up the variety in your wardrobe?

MAURA BREWER: No not at all. I think you know this is a sort of difference between Abigail and I. I'm trained as a visual artist and so for me the idea of having a garment that I could wear every day has always been a kind of dream of mine because I have to make so many creative choices during the day. It's very appealing that I could sort of eliminate one of those choices. So the second Abigail had a prototype, I like threw it on and never looked back.

AMT: Ok. Now Abigail was there a time when you worried the jumpsuit might not be appropriate for certain occasions? Or does it come in sparkle?

ABIGAIL GLAUM-LATHBURY: Oh two very good questions. So I have a couple of fancy fancy jumpsuits. I have one that's polkadot which I wear very frequently which is actually also the answer to your first question which is have I ever felt inappropriate? And the answer to that and I really had to think hard about this is no with one exception and that one exception was when I was invited to a wedding where both of the brides were also wearing jump suit. And so I was nervous to upstage the brides. And so one of them was wearing the white version and the other one was wearing the black version and so I opted for the polkadot version so not to upstage them.

AMT: Ok well our listeners can see photos of the jumpsuit on our website cbc.ca/thecurrent. And we have also linked to your site where we can read your manifesto and where you actually have jumpsuits on order. But I want to talk about that manifesto. Maura how is your jumpsuit project a critique of American capitalism?

MAURA BREWER: Well so I think capitalism and fashion are really closely intertwined and that capitalism tells us that we are all competing with each other all the time and fashion has always sort of served as an extension of that, a way to produce hierarchies and social space; like who's cool and who isn't cool and who can afford what. And our clothes are sort of signaling our differentness all the time. And so for us it's important to think about the ways that clothes might be able to bring us together and produce community.

AMT: And what kinds of historical examples were in your mind when you were developing this concept?

MAURA BREWER: Yeah. So for us thinking about — we call dressing to produce like a shared community "counter fashion." We've been for the last four years doing a lot of research into different kinds of alternative and utopian dress. And so you can really see counter fashion happening you know for as long as fashion has existed as a modern phenomena maybe starting with the French Revolution and the Sankula which was a garment that French workers wore. And then you know other people adopted to signal solidarity with the workers. We're also very interested in 19th century feminist dress reform which was the movement to get women out of corsets. And in fact our name the Rational Dress Society is drawn from a feminist Dress Reform movement from the late 19th century which was called by the same name.

AMT: Oh so you're talking about like the Victorian kind of dressing and…

MAURA BREWER: Yeah yeah. Susan B Anthony actually wrote a lot about garments and the ways that women really wouldn't you know Victorian garments were extremely cumbersome and heavy and restricting and she was very concerned that woman wouldn't be able to hold a job unless they could come up with a different thing for women to wear. And so if you can't have a job the only way of making money that you have as a woman especially in Victorian-era America is to make money by marriage. So for her like finding something that women could wear was extremely important and that's where the Bloomers garment comes from in 1850s.

AMT: And you know at the same time when you talk about some critique of American capitalism one could argue fashion today has made clothing more democratic. Pretty ornate clothing was once only for the very rich. And now anyone can have it.

ABIGAIL GLAUM-LATHBURY: Yeah. So I think a lot of things about this. So the language of democracy frequently gets used in terms of like fast fashion. So taking runway styles and then turning them around in a short amount of time into styles that really anybody can buy for very low sums of money which sounds fine except for the conditions under which those garments are being produced which are generally pretty terrible.

AMT: The work conditions.

ABIGAIL GLAUM-LATHBURY: Yeah the work conditions. Absolutely. And just like the volumes of clothing.

AMT: It's interesting I was just reading last week that H&M has such an inventory that they can't move, that there's actually a power plant in one town where H&M founded its first store and it actually burns defective products that the retailer can't sell to create energy. That's how much leftover they have.

ABIGAIL GLAUM-LATHBURY: Yeah that was an incredible piece in The New York Times. Maura and I were having a meltdown about it.

[Sound: laughter]

AMT: That's about fast fashion, right? So much fast fashion that you can't even move at all.

MAURA BREWER: Right. I mean it's extra crazy because you have a situation in which like H&M is producing so many garments that there are you know billions of dollars’ worth of garments that no one wants. And so then there are like burning those garments to make energy to make more garments that no one wants, right? So I think we find ourselves in a really extreme situation.

AMT: And I want to ask a few more questions about that as well. But let's talk practicalities as well. One of the big challenges with a jumpsuit is sizing. We asked Don Kerr about this in addition to playing with the Rheostatics he is the front man for the Toronto band Communism and they wear vintage jumpsuits in their act.

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VOICE 1: It has to really fit properly which is not easy to come by. You can get one that's the right length from neck to cuff at the bottom of the leg but you put it on and the crotch is either choking you or hanging down by your knees.

AMT: Ok I think he's essentially talking about the length of the inseam, huh? What about the sizing for jumpsuits? How tough is that?

ABIGAIL GLAUM-LATHBURY: So I'm totally going to jump in on this. We have 248 individual sizes and the big challenge here and the reason why we have so many sizes is actually largely because of height. So when you sow your pants to your shirt you the situation that was just described where you can have the torso length essentially it can be either much too short in which case you can't wear the garment or much too long and in that scenario it actually just becomes difficult to walk.

AMT: You got some inspiration from NASA on this didn't you?

ABIGAIL GLAUM-LATHBURY: It was interesting developing the sizing table. So I'm a trained fashion designer. So Maura is an artist and I'm trained as a fashion designer and I actually teach fashion design and so I have stacks of textbooks that have sizing tables on them. And one of the most interesting things to me was when I first started I was thinking where am I going to find this data and how exactly do you accommodate more than just an industry sample size which is generally on the whole quite small and also tall. And so I ended up having to move outside of that sort of fashion data and I found a number of points of data from uniform companies, military data, and there's a really wonderful anthropometric study that's was released by NASA.

AMT: What about people with disabilities or mobility issues? Are there people that for jumpsuits might not work?

ABIGAIL GLAUM-LATHBURY: Yeah there are actually. There absolutely are. So a lot of what we talk about you know we are offering a solution. But essentially the other way to think about the garment is that it provokes a conversation. And so you know whether or not somebody is adopting our garments, right? It's not about sort of substituting one thing for another thing so much as it is about having a broader conversation around dress and ideas of you know the conflation of consumption and expression.

AMT: Ok I fully accept that but I do have to ask one practical question. What about the bathroom? Like public washroom, dirty floors, a toilet.

MAURA BREWER: Yeah we get asked this question a lot. It was actually one of the most surprising things to me about the project is how much anxiety people have about jumpsuit bathroom compatibility issues. I will say that for me it has never been a significant problem. You know one thing I think is that every garment has a kind of trade-off. So you know you don't have to pick out your tops so you save a couple of minutes there but then maybe you have to take a couple extra minutes in the bathroom you know taking off your sweater first. But otherwise you know I think it's pretty straightforward our zippers very fast acting. So I personally have not encountered any significant challenges in the bathroom department.

AMT: Ok well I'll accept that. I want to bring in another voice here. Heather Radke test drove or test wore the jumpsuit and she wrote about all of this in the Paris Review and she joins us now. Hi Heather.

HEATHER RADKE: Hi.

AMT: What was it about the concept of the jumpsuit that appealed to you?

HEATHER RADKE: Well I had heard about Abigail and Maura's work from when I was a curator in Chicago and I'd always been interested in it because I actually don't like picking out my clothes and I've never really had a great experience with fashion. You know I don't hate it or anything but it's just not been my favourite part of life. But it's actually just such a present part of every single day of your life. So when I started to read more about their project I was just super excited about the way that they were critiquing the fashion industry and I was frankly just curious like could you wear a jumpsuit all the time?

AMT: And so what did yours look like when you took it out of the box? We know it looks like a jumpsuit. But what was yours like?

HEATHER RADKE: Well so I had a denim version of the jumpsuit so it was sort of like dark blue denim. And I'd say the jumpsuit looks somewhere between Rosie the Riveter and Car Mechanic. And so when Abigail handed it to me it was folded in a nice little rectangle and I brought it home and I tried it on and I was actually surprised about the fit as Abigail and Maura know because they saw me the next day. And I was surprised actually about how loose it was.

AMT: And this bothered you?

HEATHER RADKE: Well I think that we live in a — well at least for me — time of tight clothing. So I think I actually just had never or it had probably been years since I had worn such a loose garment in public.

AMT: And as you continued to wear it what did you think?

HEATHER RADKE: I mean I think that the main takeaway I had from the three weeks in the jumpsuit was that I really had an experience of thinking about what I was wearing. So every morning I just really noticed that I didn't have to choose anything to wear. I had already chosen. And every day at work I was kind of anxious that maybe somebody would notice that I haven't been wearing the same thing for you know not just three days in a row but three weeks in a row. And I started to notice things actually a lot about my gender and my gender identity. You know I'm a pretty femme lady and I started to really notice how the way that I was presenting myself had a lot actually to do with my clothes.

AMT: Tell me more about that.

HEATHER RADKE: So you know like I was in a work meeting and normally to a work meeting I'd wear something like a skirt and some high heeled shoes or something and all of a sudden I was wearing like you know what felt like a work garment as much as anything else. And I think that that actual juxtaposition of feeling like: "Oh this is not a particularly feminine garment." And I realized how often in various situations I feel certain power or a certain kind of authority that comes from wearing more feminine garments. Maybe that's like a little bit vague but I think what I really mean to say is that…

AMT: I get that...like a sexual power?

HEATHER RADKE: Well I mean I guess it's a thing. It's not exactly like a sexual power in the sense that it's related to sex. I guess that what I realized is what a professional outfit was for me was actually a very feminine outfit.

AMT: How did people around you react to you?

HEATHER RADKE: Well it's funny because I think part of the only thing I notice is like how few people actually pay attention to what you're wearing.

[Sound: Laughter]

HEATHER RADKE: Some people noticed of course and said something to me. Like I work with students and I had a student that I saw a couple of times over the course of one week and he was sort of like "What's up with the outfit?" But then you know actually I just told some people I was coming to do this interview and they were like "Wait you’re a jumpsuit for three weeks?" And these were people who saw me you know most of the days of those three weeks and hadn't noticed at all.

AMT: So you came away with a different view of your relationship to your clothing?

HEATHER RADKE: I definitely did and I still think about it every day. Even when I was coming to the studio today I was like "Oh what should I wear? How do I look professional?" But then it's also funny because this is radio so in some ways I could be wearing anything right now and it wouldn't really matter.

AMT: I could be wearing a jumpsuit [laughs].

HEATHER RADKE: Exactly. We can all be wearing jumpsuits.

AMT: Maybe I should be, right.

HEATHER RADKE: Yes exactly [laughs].

AMT: Ok well Heather thanks for speaking to us about this.

HEATHER RADKE: Thank you.

AMT: Heather Radke test wore the jumpsuit. She wrote about this in the Paris Review. Bring back our two designers Abigail Glaum-Lathbury is in Chicago, Maura Brewer is in L.A. So Heather talked about the power she felt and kind of dressing in a certain way — dressing femme. Like Maura what do you think of that and that versus the jumpsuit? What's the message? What's the thinking there? What's your political mind doing with that?

MAURA BREWER: Yeah you know it's an interesting question. Abigail and I have talked about this a lot in terms of like our different experiences adopting the garment. I think you know for me I have typically not dressed very femme and so it was a very easy garment for me to adopt that I felt very comfortable in. But you know overall I think that for us it was important to make a garment that would sort of be comfortable and practical and that a wide range of people would be able to wear without it seeming like a costume or drawing some kind of crazy attention to yourself. And so by that standard I think it's very functional.

AMT: Well we brought this idea to one of Canada's biggest fashion mavens to see what she would think of the jumpsuit concept. Jeanne Beker hosted Fashion Television for 30 years. This is what she had to say.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Conceptually the idea delights me and terrifies me at the same time because I see wardrobe as a means of personal self-expression and a great way to communicate with other people and give signals about who you are, express your identity. Everyone wearing the same baggy white jumpsuit you know not so much. I don't know where that will leave us although I suppose we could just accessorize like crazy.

AMT: Ok. Canadian style guru Jeanne Beker. Maura what about that idea of self-expression, communication, you've talked a little bit about how we use fashion for this but maybe fashion uses us.

MAURA BREWER: You know a lot of times we see fashion as just a kind of natural extension of ourselves or our personal taste. We have like this idea that we're expressing ourselves through garments and that our individuality is extremely important and central to that. However I teach in a sort of lecture style classroom and I'll sort of look out at my students and you know in terms of our day to day choices we really do already tend to dress quite similarly. Like most people are wearing jeans and a T-shirt or some kind of combination of that. I have a friend who said something to me that I think is really interesting which is that in some ways our garments used to communicate a lot more. Like you used to be able to wear morning dress for example like to wear black to signify that you have lost someone and that people should sort of relate to you differently. Now if you wear black no one notices at all, right?

AMT: You don't wear black people notice [laughs].

MAURA BREWER: Right. Totally. So in some ways our garments communicate much less I think than we think they do.

AMT: It's interesting we see a lot of uniformity in clothing in dystopian science fiction. Look at the Handmaid's Tale for example. What do you think of that?

MAURA BREWER: Well I think you know just as often it's in utopian science fiction like Star Trek. So I think actually the relationship between science fiction — I'm a big science fiction fan — the relationship between science fiction and jumpsuits is actually a really interesting one. You know the jumpsuit on the one hand has these associations with work wear but it also has close ties to space travel, right? Like jumpsuit is like parachuting that's where the jump comes from in jumpsuit and then that kind of garment gets adapted and becomes a space suit. And so by the time you get to the 1960s you have all these designers like Rudi Gernreich for instance using the jumpsuit, mobilizing the jumpsuit as a sign of futurity and equality.

AMT: And at the same time what would you say to people who grew up under some kind of totalitarianism? The Mao jacket…

MAURA BREWER: Sure.

AMT: The idea that you can't wear a tie in Iran because that is Western.

MAURA BREWER: Yeah. Yeah.

AMT: Different religious demands on clothing.

MAURA BREWER: Yeah absolutely. You know one thing that's important to us is that garments in and of themselves don't have political valence, right? Like they there's nothing inherently political about a tie or a pair of pants. It's the context in which garments are utilized that gives them meaning, right? So a garment like Mao suit actually really predates Mao historically. It came about in early 20th century China as a way of sort of response to the Western suit like the way that Chinese people might be able to develop their own kind of business uniform and then is taken up by Mao and receives the sort of cultural connotations of the cultural revolution. But it is also a garment that still commonly worn in Chinese diplomatic settings. Or you might think about something like the Pussy hat or the MAGA hat, right? These are garments you know before the election in the United States you could wear a red baseball cap and no one would look at you twice. Now you can't really wear a baseball cap without it you know people sort of taking a closer look at you, right? So garments kind of pick up these cultural and historical and social meanings and these meanings change over time.

AMT: And I guess the jumpsuit would change over time too if we all adopted it then.

MAURA BREWER: Definitely.

ABIGAIL GLAUM-LATHBURY: So we have a tagline, we always talk about rejecting choice and we talk about that in terms of like the idea of consumer choices. But we also talk about that you have to choose to reject choice, right? Which sounds sort of ridiculous but jumpsuit isn't a mandate. It is a proposition, right? It is an option or a vehicle for discussion. We do not have any political power to put everybody in jumpsuit.

AMT: So you actually care less about what we wear and more about what we think?

MAURA BREWER: Definitely.

ABIGAIL GLAUM-LATHBURY: Yeah I think that's absolutely right.

MAURA BREWER: Yeah we see jumpsuit as a tool, right? Like if people think similarly to us then it's an option or a kind of gift from us to them that they could opt into this garment. But I also think that it's important to know that you don't have to own a jumpsuit to be a member of the Rational Dress Society. It's our shared beliefs that draw us together.

AMT: Ok well thank you for your thoughts and your ideas.

ABIGAIL GLAUM-LATHBURY: Thank you.

MAURA BREWER: Thank you.

AMT: Abigail Glaum-Lathbury and Maura Brewer are the founders of the Rational Dress Society. We reached them in Chicago and Los Angeles, respectively. Let us know what you think about the tyranny of fashion and the environmental cost of fast fashion. Is the jumpsuit the answer? Tweet us at @TheCurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook. Go to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent and click on the contact link. Coming up in our next half hour...It was 50 years ago today in Memphis that the assassination of Martin Luther King J.r occurred. We’ll examine his legacy through the eyes of an activist, and an historian. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current on CBC Radio One, Sirius XM, online on cbc.ca/thecurrent, on podcast, and on your radio app.

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Much of Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy distorted in modern times, says historian

Guests: Bree Newsome, Nathan Connolly

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Dr. Martin Luther King, the apostle of non-violence and the civil rights movement, has been shot to death in Memphis, Tennessee. Police have issued an all-points bulletin for a well-dressed young white man seen running from the scene. Dr. King was standing on the balcony of a second floor hotel room tonight when according to a companion a shot was fired from across the street. In the friend's words, the bullet exploded in his face.

AMT: That was CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite announcing the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. 50 years ago today. Reverend Jesse Jackson was the friend Mr. Cronkite quoted there who had witnessed the violence. Reverend Jackson spoke with CBC's The National earlier this week.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Every time I'm near Memphis the scap comes off and the sore's still raw. Reverand Adam came on said get back my friend Martin you can't leave us now and we stood there transfixed really. Got up and wiped off my shirt and went and called Mrs. King and she said I'm in the bed reading and I said the doc had been called I think in the shoulder, I couldn't say what I'd really seen. She says I'll be there as quickly as I can get there. Of course within a few minutes they pronounced him dead, it was a tragic moment.

AMT: As tens of thousands of Americans gather in Memphis today to remember that tragic moment a sore still raw, as Reverand Jackson puts it. We look back at Martin Luther King Jr.'s vision. In a moment, we'll hear from a historian who says the anniversary is an opportunity to dig deeper into the civil rights leader's message, a message that is often oversimplified in the rush to commemorate him. But first, we'll hear from one young activist who says the Black Lives Matter protest movement we see today is an extension of Martin Luther King Jr.'s unfinished business. Bree Newsome is a community organizer and civil rights activist from Charlotte, North Carolina. And we've reached her today in Memphis. Hello.

BREE NEWSOME: Hi. Thank you for having me.

AMT: What's it like for you to be in Memphis today Bree.

BREE NEWSOME: So I think the nation and I guess in many ways the world we're just at this very strange cross point you know having this kind of like 50-year retrospection on the life of King and on the mission of King. But at the same time you know the nation is still very much embroiled in issues of civil rights, of police violence. We are seeing a renewed attack on public education. And so you know it's a moment to reflect on history but also to really kind of examine the present moment. I think that many of the things that Martin Luther King was speaking to particularly at the end of his life was very prescient. And I think that's why you see everyone kind of pausing and really taking a deeper dive into what he was saying because it is so pertinent to what we're facing today.

AMT: And so you are in Memphis where it happened. And so for those who don't know just tell us what you see when you're at the complex of the National Civil Rights Museum with the Lorraine Motel right there where he was shot on the balcony.

BREE NEWSOME: Yes. So the room that he stayed in the night before and you know the balcony where he was shot both of those things have been preserved obviously and turned into the National Civil Rights Museum. So you know when you walk up and approach the Lorraine Motel and this is actually my first time visiting it's a very surreal experience. I mean it really does feel frozen in time. They have a couple of cars from that time period parked out front. And so you know with the exception of the parking lot having been removed much of it looks the same as it did at that time.

AMT: I've been there and as you walk up to it it really does take you back to another moment onto the 60s.

BREE NEWSOME: Absolutely.

AMT: We heard Reverand Jackson describe the assassination of Dr. King as not just a tragedy but a sore that is still raw. What impact do you think that violent death has had on the country over the last 50 years?

BREE NEWSOME: Well I think the impact has been tremendous. You know obviously I wasn't alive at the time that it happened but you know speaking to you know relatives and my family who were you know they just they describe the feeling at the time of you know being one of defeat or of almost like hopelessness. There certainly wasn't a sense in 1968 that Martin Luther King had accomplished his mission. And I think that the nation felt very lost at that point in time. And then of course you know the assassination of Robert Kennedy followed soon after which I think dealt another blow to the civil rights movement and to whatever hope people had of those issues being addressed. And so I think when we look at where we are in 2018 you know we were celebrating the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Day as well in January but this moment in April of marking 50 years since his assassination it's a markedly different mood because I think what we are reflecting on is the reality and the truth of how his mission was violently interrupted, his mission of nonviolence and justice was violently interrupted, and so many of the things that he was trying to address in his lifetime we are still confronting today.

AMT: Well I want to explore that with you further. But first I want to play you a clip from his famous speech during the March on Washington for jobs and freedom in 1963. Everyone knows the famous “I Have A Dream” lines of that speech. But what comes before it is often forgotten. Let's listen.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note…a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked insufficient funds. But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so, we've come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.

[Sound: Cheering and applause]

AMT: Bree Newsome what are you thinking?

BREE NEWSOME: Well I think it's very interesting. I think it's important to recognize that at the time of his assassination Martin Luther King was not a popular figure in America and even to the extent that he has been embraced to the extent that he is commemorated now by mainstream America it's often a watered down version of his message. Just like you mentioned oftentimes you know our understanding of Martin Luther King's message has kind of narrowed down to the March on Washington and really just to that “I Have A Dream” part of his speech. You know he succeeded in getting the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Act passed but he made very clear in the latter part of his life that he viewed that as simply part one of the civil rights movement. He felt that in order for America to really transcend issues of racism and poverty and militarism that the nation itself had to undergo a radical transformation of values. It wasn't simply a matter of integrating black Americans into American society as it existed in the 60s.

AMT: And there were tensions between the older generation of activists and the younger ones at the time.

BREE NEWSOME: Oh absolutely. That's the other thing too. I think sometimes you know the sit in protests which are very celebrated and embraced. Now those were highly controversial at the time. I mean no one had seen that before. You know they took you know methods and strategies that Gandhi had employed in the free India movement. But no one had seen anything like that in the American south before. Young black people going into you know segregated lunch counters and refusing to move until they were arrested you know engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience. That was very radical at the time.

AMT: Now you've written about your own experience as a young activist encountering skepticism from older ones. What was that like for you?

BREE NEWSOME: Yes. You know it's very ironic. So I think to a certain extent intergenerational tensions within black freedom movement I think that is something that has always existed. I don't think that part is new. I do think that there are some dynamics that we are confronting today in modern civil rights movement that are different from the landscape in the 1960s and that is part of what contributes to a differing opinion over tactics. So for instance you know nowadays we are dealing with mass incarceration. We're dealing with the school to prison pipeline. We're really dealing with the criminalization of blackness. And I think to a certain extent or to a large extent rather the black and middle and upper class have really benefited from the gains of the civil rights movement more so than the majority of black Americans who have been disproportionately impacted by things like the war on drugs, welfare reform, the 94 crime bill. And so when you see things like what unfolded in Ferguson or Baltimore or in my home city of Charlotte these are young people who you know we were kind of raised to believe that we were the inheritors of the gains of the civil rights movement and while that is true and while we can see some of those gains that have taken place including the election of the nation's first black president there's you know a very grim reality that we face which is that in many ways things have not improved. For instance the child poverty rate for black youth is the same now as it was at the time that King was assassinated.

AMT: And so connect the dots even more then from the speech we heard you know when he says we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt to Black Lives Matter today.

BREE NEWSOME: Absolutely. So I think that what you see with Black Lives Matter in particular and some of these younger protests there's really an embracing of the kind of like 1967 Martin Luther King Jr. You know the Martin Luther King Jr. who recognized that integration itself was not the be all and end all of the movement and I think that you know I am included it among many people who really view ourselves as picking up in many ways where that movement was disrupted and ended terminated early. And so many of these issues that we are trying to address; issues such as poverty, you know systemic racism, we are really carrying forward the banner. In many ways that's not to say that there hasn't been any civil rights movement between 1968 and now. Of course that's not the case. Many people have been organizing for civil rights between then and now. But I think there was a combination of factors. I think the election of Barack Obama which many people saw as a turning point of us reaching a kind of like post-racial America followed by the high profile case of Trayvon Martin, the United States Supreme Court striking down key parts of the Voting Rights Act. I think these are a combination of things that led to this new uptick in protests. There are similar conditions existing at the start of the 1960s civil rights movement. You had many black Americans returning for World War II and feeling entitled to another level of rights. You had the Emmett Till case and you had Brown v. Board of Education. So there are a lot of parallels but also of course nuances and differences in this modern era.

AMT: You talk about the movement disrupted with his assassination. Had he lived — if he were alive today — what would you think we would have seen differently over the last 50 years?

BREE NEWSOME: You know I honestly I think that is hard to say to a certain extent. It's almost hard for me — to be honest with you — to imagine Martin Luther King Jr. having survived to this point. And I think that was something that he himself recognized and understood at the time that he you know committed himself to taking on this mission and particularly when he made the decision to speak so vocally against the Vietnam War. I mean you know some of his peers warned him at the time that would likely increase the danger that he faced.

AMT: And so it's almost hard to imagine that being the case because there was such a concerted effort by the federal government, by many others to undermine the civil rights movement to target leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., and really to disrupt any efforts to organize for black civil rights for quite a period of time and I think part of what we are seeing now is that we are in many ways just now recovering from the devastation and the trauma of that period of time. You also see activists and organizers today really making a lot of judgements based on what we have learned and what we observe from the past…

AMT: Including not having one leader, right?

BREE NEWSOME: Exactly. Absolutely.

AMT: So there's not one target that somebody can be stopped.

BREE NEWSOME: Exactly. That's a very strategic decision to make sure that our movement could not be in as easily disrupted as what happened in the 60s.

AMT: Bree Newsome thank you for your insights. It's good to talk to you today.

BREE NEWSOME: Thank you for having me.

AMT: Bye bye.

BREE NEWSOME: Bye bye.

AMT: Bree Newsome is a community organizer and civil rights activist from Charlotte, North Carolina. She spoke to us from Memphis, Tennessee. As we heard from Bree Newsome, it's not uncommon for people to look back on Martin Luther King Jr. and focus on messages of racial equality and moderation. Our next guest says King's politics were considerably more complicated and more radical than that. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University. We reached him this morning in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Hello.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: Good morning. How do you see Dr. King's legacy being distorted in the years since his death?

NATHAN CONNOLLY: It's important to remember that it took a considerable amount of effort on the part of Coretta Scott King and friends of the family to try to elevate Martin Luther King into someone who deserved a national holiday. Coretta Scott King in particular helped to secure five million signatures to try to make the King Day holiday real. And it was signed into a national holiday in November of 1983 by President Ronald Reagan. And for that to be a moment that both conservatives and liberals could get behind a lot of King's message had to be appropriated and crammed into very small frames. Reagan himself went around to elementary schools oftentimes talking to young black children and telling them that Martin Luther King would have been in favour of Reaganomics and trickle down visions of economic growth; tax cuts for the wealthy. He saw King as someone who would oppose affirmative action. That too was a message that has lingered.

AMT: Yeah it's interesting I remember that time and if I'm remembering correctly there were people who wanted to repeal that day even after.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: Oh sure. I mean there was very scandalously you know efforts in Arizona to not recognize it as a national holiday given the states’ rights issues that linger around these questions. I mean there are a number of people who saw King both during his life and in some cases after as a divisive figure. And part of the way that we have effectively made him a consensus builder is by making sure that we don't talk about very key parts of his message. I mean Martin Luther King was in favour of reparations for instance; reparations for slavery, reparations for Jim Crow. He was very explicit about that. And so those kinds of things are considered you know by and large beyond the pale now. But it's also important to keep in mind that you know King today has over 90 per cent approval rating. Most people have a positive association with King mostly because they don't really know what he said about most issues.

AMT: So in fact he wasn't a popular guy. He was actually really putting himself out there at the time with radical ideas.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: He was. He was. I think we have a tendency to look at his speeches in 1967 against the Vietnam War, in 1968 when the poor people's campaign as somehow being a break in both his popularity and his messaging. But prior to the 1967 speech, 1966, and even earlier he was polling very unfavourably among most Americans; certainly unfavourably among white Americans. One Gallup poll placed 75 per cent unfavourable ratings among whites for King at the time. Again that’s a year before his Vietnam speech. And even you know well into the late 50s through the 60s I mean King was adopting very radical stances on issues of labour organizing, on issues of economic justice. It was in fact Coretta Scott King and Martin together who thought a lot about socialism as being the best form of economic planning for the country relative to what they had seen as deep inequality. And so a lot of what we now have taken to be the acceptable desegregation message of King and his allies you know was at a time considered to be very very much out of bounds and in fact one of the great successes of King and his religious community was that they were able to basically win the argument about theological justifications for segregation. People used to quote the Bible chapter and verse. You know oftentimes St. Paul about you know why people should not be mingling together in the way the birds don't mingle together out in nature, right? And so it was really a stroke of rhetorical genius to be able to outflank even religious supporters of segregation to basically make it a moral charge that the country should abolish Jim Crow segregation and we have you know his theological brilliance to thank for that.

AMT: It's interesting. He really was masterful in speeches and we heard it in that last speech just that voice in his choice of words really quite something. And you have talked about that Vietnam speech and so did Bree Newsome. I've got a little piece of that. Let's listen to that now.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

AMT: Nathan Connolly tell us more about the significance of what he called the Beyond Vietnam speech.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: So the way in which King was able to broaden the scope of his moral charges against the evils of militarism, racism, consumerism; he saw you know the plight of people in Vietnam as an extension of imperial practices of harvesting you know rubber and building first world nations at the expense of third world nations. I mean it was considered for many people to be a radical shift for King to begin talking about foreign relations. But King was a character on the world stage from the late 1950s. He was in Ghana during the independence struggle there. He had gone obviously to Europe to receive the Nobel Prize. He was a global figure and he oftentimes had a global perspective. I think that idea that he puts forward in that very speech about a radical revolution in our values is work that still undone. I mean he talks in large measure about getting people to think about personal relationships and human rights and human values and not about objects. And we live in a moment where still you know we have a very strong cult of celebrity, we have a very strong you know cult of military expansion, and the belief that the country can only solve its problems by large by keeping violence on the table that isn't in keeping with the message of Jesus Christ which the country claims by and large to follow as a Christian nation. And it certainly isn't he being with the most effective ways in which are moral arguments has remained part of the national fibre through persuasion and through really building coalitions and people working together. So King was really trying I think to get the country to evolve. Obviously the way that he was killed and the messages that he was able to give in life made it harder I think for people to believe that nonviolence could really be the only or even the best way. And there are a number of people who decided with King's killing that was kind of the end of nonviolence as a viable strategy and so we still have to struggle to make the argument for the importance of nonviolence and our own country I think has to still work hard to adopt that as its core principle.

AMT: So how did society go from the big things that you're talking about to him being used as a symbol in ads for Chrysler during the Super Bowl?

NATHAN CONNOLLY: Right. So you know King is a brilliant speechmaker. And you know the ad that just came forward this past January around his birthday marking the Super Bowl was an excerpted speech about what he called the Drum Major Instinct and it was a speech that was at a time really trying to get people to not think about materialism and consumerism. He has very explicit lines in that speech encouraging people not to buy whiskey thinking it will make them a better person or a particular kind of make up. Even the drum major instinct is you know the desire of people to be out in front which he actively discouraged. He said if you're going to be a drum major for anything be a drum major for justice and so I think one of the strategies that has consistently been the case is people taking his speeches out of context; you know just key lines here or there. Obviously most famously or infamously the “I Have A Dream” speech with the very you know well-known line that people should be judged not by the colour of their skin but the content of their character. That was a line obviously meant to undermine segregation that was then used in later years by opponents of affirmative action to basically get rid of what was at the time a historically conscious way of trying to redress past wrongs.

AMT: This is what you call the flattening of his legacy.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think part of what needs to be done going forward when we think about King and his message is you know what exactly were the bullet points the key principles that he in fact fought for. It’s great to have speeches and the March holidays. But you know the platform around fair housing, the platform around the poverty, the platform around workers’ rights; you know all of that needs to still be carried forward. There is so much that has been left unattended to. Even when King was killed it was in the wake of that national mourning that Lyndon Johnson was able to put forward the Fair Housing Act in 1968 basically a week after his killing riding that momentum. And fair housing is still an unrealized goal. We still have deep segregation and school inequality as a result of that. And so anything that can take up the actual political battles that King was fighting for will be where the next chapter of a struggle is to go.

AMT: Ok. And I guess the very fact that the 50th anniversary of shining a light on his legacy and what he really said has forced a conversation both in your country and mine. Thank you Nathan Connolly.

NATHAN CONNOLLY: Thank you very much.

AMT: Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University. He is also the co-host of a weekly American history podcast called Backstory. He joined us from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. That's our program for today. Stay tuned to Radio One for Q. Today, Tom Power is joined by musician Jack White. His new album is called "Boarding House Reach." Finally still keeping on the topic of Martin Luther King Jr. April 9th, 1968, was the day that the funeral services were held for Dr. King. And as we heard he understood that his life was in jeopardy and he had already requested what would be sung at his funeral. The singer and activist Mahalia Jackson sang his favourite hymn, "Take My Hand, Precious Lord." Mahalia Jackson had accompanied King at rallies for years. It's said she was standing near King at the 1963 March on Washington. During his speech, she made a suggestion to him, saying, "Tell them about the dream, Martin." We'll leave you with Mahalia Jackson from the funeral of Martin Luther King Jr. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Thanks for listening to The Current.

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April 4, 2018 Full Episode Transcript

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