In honor of Martin Luther King; an interview with MLK, Hoover and Gandhi on the Flipside

On behalf of Dr. Martin Luther King, I’m excerpting a few of the passages where he made an appearance. In this first instance, we were interviewing Muhammed Ali, when Jennifer said “Martin Luther King showed up a few minutes ago.” It was the end of our session, so I took that last minute of it to ask him a few questions.

My questions and comments are in italics, and Jennifer Shaffer’s answers are in bold. We’ve been conducting these interviews for five years now on a weekly basis. In this case, because it was MLK’s birthday I decided to see if he was available to converse with us.

In the construct of this class, I “ask” my friend Luana Anders on the Flipside if he can join us in the classroom. Then when I go to see Jennifer I ask her if “anyone” has come to class. Often she mentions the name of the person I’ve requested.

I ask the same questions “who was there to greet you?” in order to start a conversation before getting into difficult areas. However, in Hoover’s case, I just went to the questions I was curious about. In Gandhi’s case, how could I not ask him some questions if he stopped by our class? I’ve been in his home, some of his ashes are scattered near our home in Santa Monica — and I’ve been to the shrine in Delhi were he died.