Melissa Harris-Perry, presidential chair of Wake Forest University’s department of politics and international affairs, urged an audience at Washington and Lee to learn from civil rights activists in her Martin Luther King Jr. Day keynote speech.
Her speech was in Keller Theatre on Jan. 20, which was also the day of the inauguration of President Donald Trump. While Harris-Perry honored the life of King, she also took time to analyze the state of American politics — and discussed how both topics become more nuanced in a town like Lexington where Lee-Jackson Day is celebrated.
“It’s complicated in all the ways that I think American politics are complicated,” Harris-Perry said. “Jackson-Lee, King, Trump Day feels like the most American day ever.”
She recognized the efforts of all of the contributors to the Civil Rights Movement, not just King. During an audience Q&A, she referenced the bravery and sacrifice of children in Birmingham, Ala., who understood the greater goal of the Civil Rights Movement.
“They were there resisting but they also didn’t make it about them,” Harris-Perry said. “They actually made their suffering redemptive for the country.”
Harris-Perry said today’s society needs some thicker skin, not because people should accept harm, but because they should search for the more important values in life.
“We need a little more gumption,” she said. “We have to care more about our democracy, more about our university, more about our students, more about our families, more about our communities, than just exclusively about our feelings.”
When asked about how to address belittling behavior, whether gendered or racist, Harris-Perry encouraged the crowd of Washington and Lee University students and professors and Lexington community members to look at the bigger impact and use the personal experience to encourage social progress.
“Sometimes you take the loss on your individual moment in order to move forward the thing you’re trying to move forward,” she said.
Harris-Perry also offered advice to address the polarized political climate in the U.S.
“It’s a democracy and not everybody agrees with you and not everybody who disagrees with you is your enemy,” Harris-Perry said. “Maybe get to know something about people.”
Another solution, Harris-Perry said, is to teach children some “American lies” because they invoke a sense of patriotism and pride that can last for a lifetime.
“I actually really want people to think of the halls of Congress as hallowed. I want you to get a little choked up at the Lincoln Memorial,” she said. “You will actually be more engaged with preserving the project of American self-governance that is idealistic, but nonetheless a damn good ideal.”
Harris-Perry spent some time in the spotlight as a political commentator. She hosted “The Melissa Harris-Perry Show” on weekend mornings from 2012 to 2016 on MSNBC.
While on MSNBC, Harris-Perry said her team often tried different approaches than other shows. She highlighted the show’s relationship with transgender guests, saying they were the first mainstream show to not ask them about their bodies.
She also said they were the second national show to say the name Trayvon Martin. According to the Associated Press, he was a 17-year-old who was fatally shot in 2012 by a neighborhood watch volunteer who had reported Martin as a suspicious person to police before following him and shooting him.
Martin’s death sparked outrage and protests throughout the country. The Black Lives Matter Movement was formed in response to the shooter’s acquittal.
“We covered a lot of things in that first wave of the movement for Black Lives that most other shows did not, and I’m very proud of the work that we did on that,” she said.
Sexual assault was the hardest thing for Harris-Perry to cover on her show, she said, because she is a survivor of childhood sexual assault. Harris-Perry said she would often dissociate when speaking with survivors of sexual assault.
“I’ve learned from some of the best journalists around that even if it was really touching you emotionally…don’t just put your emotions all over other people,” Harris-Perry said.
Before becoming a TV host, Harris-Perry authored several books, including “Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America.” Stereotypes can be dehumanizing, she said, because no one’s life ever aligns perfectly with what’s expected of them. She added that she had unique challenges navigating her identity as the child of a white, Mormon mother and Black father from Jim Crow Richmond.
Harris-Perry left the audience with advice on how to honor the legacy of King through education and conversation. Reading his writings and speeches are some of the most productive ways to engage with civil rights history, she said.
“Especially in a nation like the U.S., that is fairly forgetful about our history, we can see the need for progress as meaning that no progress has been made,” Harris-Perry said. “But many critically important things have changed, and those changes came from struggle and those changes came through complicated work. And to not acknowledge those changes is disrespectful of those who lived in even more challenging times.”