From John Lewis to Black Lives Matter

with John McWhorter

On this week’s show, John and I spend a long while discussing the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement. We had two decades of hard-won, substantive social and political victories for African Americans. But after that, the movement for black equality seemed not to know where to go. When we should have been looking inward to our communities, building our social capital, and making up for time lost to Jim Crow, the leaders of the movement too often turned outward, insisting that “whitey” was still to blame for all our problems. And yesterday’s “whitey” is today’s “systemic racism.” In this clip, John and I discuss what happened when the progress of the Civil Rights Movement gave way to the slogans of Stokely Carmichael and his godchildren, Black Lives Matter.

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