Red Clay Podcast S1:E5 - Sleeping Dogs Get Buried Or Dug Up

Episode 5: How People Become Stone: Legacy, Memory, and the Weight of Being Remembered

Dropping on Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday, this episode meditates on what happens when revolutionaries die and memory begins: when the flesh becomes symbol, blood becomes narrative, and the human becomes monument.How do icons bear the weight of being remembered? What does it cost to be frozen in time, your words, your image, your legacy weaponized by forces you opposed?We examine the divergent afterlives of MLK and Malcolm X. Martin succeeded materially, securing tangible civil rights gains, but his memory has been sanitized, co-opted, Santa-Claus-ified. He belongs to everyone, which means he's used by anyone. Malcolm achieved less in conventional terms, yet he remains sacred in Black radical imagination—ours, untouched, forever preserved in the autobiography and in Spike Lee and Denzel Washington's film.

Both revolutionaries faced what H. Rap Brown described: they no longer belonged to themselves, but to the people and the revolution. Their legacies are determined not by their intentions, but by how we remember, interpret, and deploy them. As Fanon and others understood, the revolutionary is condemned, to fight, to give everything, and to be re-made after death. This episode wrestles with difficult questions: Is being remembered a prison? Does immortality through legacy grant freedom or steal it? How do we honor our martyrs? What do Martin and Malcolm, and their contested memories, teach us about recognition, narrative, and the burden of iconography?

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