Welcome to Rumble with Michael Moore. This is Michael Moore and this is my podcast.

And it's Martin Luther King Day 2020. This is my first podcast on a Martin Luther King day, which is very cool.

And I was thinking yesterday, what should I do? And I started writing some things and writing about the first time I think I remember hearing or noticing Martin Luther King.

I think I was in third grade. I came to Detroit and held a march for freedom down the main street of Detroit, which is called Woodward Avenue.

And 125,000 people came out to march with him. Back in that time, 125,000 people marching anywhere was unearthed.

And this was the same year, 1963, as the Martin Luther King's Marchum Washington and his great speech there at the Lincoln Memorial.

So I was immediately taken with the concept of who he was and what he stood for going to Catholic school. It seemed very...

He seemed like he was very saintly in that sense of fighting for the greater good. And so I was taken with him.

The fourth grader, fifth grade, sixth grade, seventh grade. And I wrote about this in my book that on the evening of April 4, 1968, it was the week before Holy Week leading up to Easter.

I remember it was at a Thursday night mass. And I can't remember if I was the ultra boy or not. I seem to have a memory of that, but I'm not quite sure.

Here's what I do remember from that night. When mass was over, back in that day, the dads would all kind of leave 30 seconds to a minute early to go warm up the car.

I mean April and Michigan is fairly cold. And so they all go out to warm up the cars. And I say warm up the car. I mean the heater, respect that. And did not come on right away.

So you have to sit there and let the heat circulate. And finally, by the time those kids and moms all got out to the cars, they would be semi-warm.

And the radio would warm up and come on. And so we're coming out of the church. I can still see that front side door that would enter it out into sort of a driveway parking lot.

You know, this is essentially an all-white Catholic church as most of them were. And I remember walking out the door with my mom and my sisters, the other parishioners.

And one of the dads was standing up on this floor board that kind of stuck out a little bit from the car, not really, but you know, back in the day.

And he's got his head and his chest raised above the cars so we can all see him. And he shots out. They shot Martin Luther King.

King, a cheer went up, not by everybody, but I'd say a good third of the people were very happy to hear this news. Now I'm in eighth grade at this time. And I think I was more in shock at the reaction of people who were cheering this than I wasn't hearing the actual news that Martin Luther King might be dead.

And it made me sick. Really looking around these people. Why would they be happy? Why were they cheering? It was confusing to me at that age. I was 13. I write a little bit more about this in my book. So if you want to read it tomorrow, talk about it some other time. I don't want to talk about it today because today I want to celebrate Martin Luther King. I just want to acknowledge that I know the country I grew up in.

I knew that a good chunk of its citizens were filled with hate and remain filled with hate to this day.

The fact that we could in 2016 elect a president who had a platform position of racism literally who was a proud and happy bigot and a bully.

I just think that what I witnessed there in eighth grade to the time that we're living in now, it's a really rotten feeling to think on some ways that it might have been.

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