This Is America, Still The Atlantic and Vann R. Newkirk II untangle more half-told Black history.

IT CAN BE SAID THAT the struggle over Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy has been largely settled for a long time to the detriment of history.

"What do you make of the fact that, after that assassination, some version of him is made to be an untouchable hero? How does that happen?" asks the journalist Vann R. Newkirk II. "Because he's dead," replies John Burl Smith, a community organizer and one of the last people to meet with King before his 1968 murder. "He can't do any more damage."

Posed quietly, Newkirk's question is both leading and sincere. He likely already knows the answer, of course, but that's beside the point. The question is worth raising again and again with respect to how King and the civil-rights movement are preserved in American cultural memory-now especially, as right-wing forces conspire to keep the full, complicated picture out of educational syllabi or at least strip those histories of political teeth.

The exchange between Newkirk and Smith comes near the end of Holy Week, a magisterial new narrative podcast from The Atlantic, so named for the burst of grief, fury, and violence that washed over the country in the immediate wake of King's murder just before Easter. It follows 2020's Floodlines, which Newkirk also hosted, carrying over a contiguous feel and spirit. Where Floodlines waded into the unresolved history around Hurricane Katrina, Holy Week applies the same lens to the American failure to internalize the full scope of the civil-rights movement. This project intends to honor what made King dangerous while he was alive.