In an appearance Thursday on CNN's "New Day" to discuss health care and President Trump, controversy arose when I said this:
"When I was a kid, President Kennedy did not want to introduce the civil rights bill because he said it wasn't popular, he didn't have the votes for it, et cetera. Dr. King kept putting people in the streets in harm's way to put the pressure on so that the bill would be introduced. That's what finally worked."
I was doing the appearance via Skype, which doesn't allow me to see the faces of those I am speaking with. But suffice to say, both host Alisyn Camerota and fellow guest Symone Sanders were astonished. So, it appears, are others. They shouldn't be.
In fact, I made a comparison between Trump and King deliberately …show more content…
King, along with President Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, was one of my childhood heroes. His direct action was instrumental in getting the Civil Rights Act -- introduced by President Kennedy and signed by President Johnson after Kennedy's assassination -- proposed and pushed through Congress. While I didn't mention Dr. King's famous 1963 "Letter from Birmingham Jail," that is exactly what I had in mind on the air.
The subject under discussion was an article from The Wall Street Journal, which says, among other things, that the President is "threatening to withhold payments to insurers to force Democrats to the negotiating table" and adds that their "abrupt disappearance [from the marketplace] could trigger an insurance meltdown that causes the collapse of the 2010 health law, forcing lawmakers to return to a bruising debate over its future."
I compared the President's words to Dr. King's strategy in the early 1960s. What was that strategy? King described it in his letter from Birmingham Jail. The letter was written by Dr. King as he sat in a Birmingham jail, arrested for leading a civil rights march. He was responding to eight fellow clergymen who had taken out an ad in the local newspaper calling Dr. King and his fellow demonstrators "extremists" and worse, calling instead for negotiation. Sitting in jail, King wrote his now-famous
"When I was a kid, President Kennedy did not want to introduce the civil rights bill because he said it wasn't popular, he didn't have the votes for it, et cetera. Dr. King kept putting people in the streets in harm's way to put the pressure on so that the bill would be introduced. That's what finally worked."
I was doing the appearance via Skype, which doesn't allow me to see the faces of those I am speaking with. But suffice to say, both host Alisyn Camerota and fellow guest Symone Sanders were astonished. So, it appears, are others. They shouldn't be.
In fact, I made a comparison between Trump and King deliberately …show more content…
King, along with President Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, was one of my childhood heroes. His direct action was instrumental in getting the Civil Rights Act -- introduced by President Kennedy and signed by President Johnson after Kennedy's assassination -- proposed and pushed through Congress. While I didn't mention Dr. King's famous 1963 "Letter from Birmingham Jail," that is exactly what I had in mind on the air.
The subject under discussion was an article from The Wall Street Journal, which says, among other things, that the President is "threatening to withhold payments to insurers to force Democrats to the negotiating table" and adds that their "abrupt disappearance [from the marketplace] could trigger an insurance meltdown that causes the collapse of the 2010 health law, forcing lawmakers to return to a bruising debate over its future."
I compared the President's words to Dr. King's strategy in the early 1960s. What was that strategy? King described it in his letter from Birmingham Jail. The letter was written by Dr. King as he sat in a Birmingham jail, arrested for leading a civil rights march. He was responding to eight fellow clergymen who had taken out an ad in the local newspaper calling Dr. King and his fellow demonstrators "extremists" and worse, calling instead for negotiation. Sitting in jail, King wrote his now-famous