This past Wednesday marked the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968. He died just days after joining Memphis sanitation workers to demand living wages for the working class, a year after calling for an end to the Vietnam War, and several years after the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts.

But ten years earlier, when he was still in his twenties, Martin Luther King Jr. was, among other things, an advice columnist for Ebony magazine. Writer Mychal Denzel Smith studied those columns for an article this week in The Atlantic, and he found that readers asked the civil rights leader about everything from race relations to marriage problems.

In some instances Dr. King was surprisingly unorthodox — the preacher’s thoughts on birth control are particularly eloquent — and in others, his advice was less than sage. When one reader complained about her philandering husband, he told her to self-reflect: “Are you careful with your grooming? Do you nag? Do you make him feel important?” When another described her husband as a “complete tyrant,” self-reflection on the part of the woman was, again, the answer. 

Denzel Smith joins Brooke to discuss Dr. King’s mid-century masculinity, how it is still wielded as a cudgel against young black Americans, and why he thinks Americans — black and white — are due for a vacation from MLK-mania. 

This segment is from our April 6, 2018 program, Paved With Good Intentions.