Injustice and the "Letter from Birmingham Jail" (with Dwayne Betts)

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 3 June 2024

⏱️ 64 minutes

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Summary

When poet, lawyer, and MacArthur Fellow Dwayne Betts was imprisoned for nine years at the age of 16 for carjacking, he only wept twice. One of those times was when he read Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail." In this powerful conversation with EconTalk's Russ Roberts, Betts explains why he cried, what he learned from King, King's urgency in the face of injustice, and Betts's thoughts on writing the introduction to a new volume of King's letter.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:08.0	I'm your host Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to Econ Talk. in to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done
0:24.5	going back to 2006. Our email address is mail at econ talk.org we'd love to hear from you. Today is March 9th, 2024, my guest is poet, lawyer author, Duane Betts.
0:43.8	This is Duane's fourth appearance on Econ Talk.
0:45.8	He was last here in January of 2023,
0:49.3	talking about beauty, prison, and Redaction.
0:52.7	He was a MacArthur fellow in 2021.
0:55.2	He is the founder of the Freedom Reads Project,
0:59.0	which puts great books in prison.
1:00.5	We'll talk about that later. Or maybe earlier, Duane, welcome back to Econ Talk.
1:05.0	You know, it's my absolute, absolute pleasure.
1:08.0	Our topic for today is Martin Luther King Jr's letter from a Birmingham jail and your introduction to a new
1:16.2	volume of King's work. How did this come about?
1:19.6	It's actually remarkable because in my life all good things that I've gotten and I
1:24.2	swear this is true have come when I try to do something for others and so for the
1:28.2	first time the the King family had okay a collection of books, individual books to come out that were based on their speeches.
1:36.1	And the first book was I Have a Dream and it was the introduction was written by King's Children.
1:43.0	And it's cool, the book is actually
1:45.5	paginated and laid out as King spoke.
1:48.5	So you can actually read it and kind of embody his voice almost,
1:51.8	almost like a poem, almost you know really living in the
1:55.3	words they wanted to get the books in the prison and my friend brother Yow
	...

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