Martin Luther King Jr. – Part Two – Owning the dream

Origin Story

Podmasters

Society & Culture, News, News Commentary, History

4.8 • 655 Ratings

🗓️ 11 June 2025

⏱️ 81 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Welcome to the grand finale of Origin Story season seven, as we conclude the remarkable story of Martin Luther King Jr. With the march from Selma to Montgomery and the passing of the Voting Rights Act, 1965 marked the zenith of the civil rights movement as a unified, effective force under King’s leadership. The decade-long fight to desegregate the South had given it strategic clarity and mainstream support. After that, things got much trickier as King switched his attention to economic injustice in cities like Chicago and came out against the war in Vietnam. Estranged from President Johnson, challenged by the young firebrands of Black Power, hounded by the FBI and horrified by the despair that fuelled urban riots, King spent the rest of his life on the back foot. In 1968, he staked everything on an ambitious Poor People’s Campaign but his movement had fragmented and public opinion had turned against him. On 4 April, he was shot dead in Memphis. The assassination simplified King into a martyr. We track the explosive unrest in the days after his death, the long struggle to make Martin Luther King Day a national holiday, and the way his philosophy has been caricatured and neutered by those who believe that civil rights have gone far enough. Finally, we unpack some of King’s most famous quotes to separate the myth from the reality. Why did the movement unravel after Selma? Did King pick the wrong battles or were the forces ranged against him too powerful to vanquish? What happens when a human being becomes a symbol? How has his message been whitewashed by the right? Does President Trump’s backlash politics prove that King was right to lose faith in white America’s willingness to reject racism? And what can today’s activists learn from King’s victories and defeats? Thanks for listening to season seven of Origin Story, and for supporting our work. We’ll be back soon with bonus episodes and Q&As. Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to the season finale of Origin Story Season 7.
0:12.9	In each episode we take a word, idea, event or figure from history, explain its origins and
0:17.8	talk about how it influences political discourse today.
0:21.7	I'm Dorianinsky, author of Everything Must Go. And I'm Ian discourse today. I'm Doreiennski,
0:26.0	author of Everything Must Go. And I'm Ian Dunt. I'm the author of How Wishments to Work and Why It Doesn't.
0:31.9	So I think season seven has been our most ambitious yet, and therefore the most labour intensive.
0:36.8	Thank you for following us this far. We couldn't do it without the generous support of Patreon backers.
0:41.3	So if you like the show, please consider signing up for as little as five pounds a month or subscribing via Apple Podcasts. It's been so encouraging having so many new backers this season. And we've
0:46.2	got plenty of bonus episodes on the way over the summer. I mean, none of which have been
0:49.2	recorded, but they are going to happen. You seem very confident. I'm sure it's true. Pinky
0:54.1	promise. So we sure it's true. Pinky promise.
0:55.3	So we left Martin Luther King with the march from Selma to Montgomery and I suppose
1:02.1	like the high point of the civil rights movement.
1:06.8	And I suppose the next part, we're going to talk about obviously the rest of his life
1:10.8	and then his legacy,
1:11.6	and maybe summed up by the book that he was writing in 1965, which became his final book.
1:16.6	Where do we go from here?
1:18.6	Ian, where do we go from here?
1:20.6	Expansion and therefore complication.
1:24.6	It's so odd, you know, it reminds me of you and I, in one of the Q&As,
1:29.2	once spoke about this more in common polling on how one of the things the left does. This is
1:33.7	always bundling. You know, it's always like, well, you know, you can't really support trans rights
	...

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