Poet Nikki Giovanni on white supremacy, the Capitol attack, and teaching the Virginia Tech shooter
Ways to Change the World with Krishnan Guru-Murthy
Channel 4 News
4.6 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 28 March 2024
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Nikki Giovanni has spent more than five decades in the public eye, as an activist, poet and innovator.
Born on the "wrong side of the tracks" in Knoxville, Tennessee, during the era of segregation, Giovanni came of age during the Black power and civil rights movements in 1960s in America. She came under the spotlight again in 2007, when the university she had been teaching at, Virginia Tech, was the victim of a mass shooting, carried out by one of her former students. The poem she wrote to commemorate the 32 victims, “We are Virginia Tech”, touched many people across the world.
In this episode of Ways to Change the World, Nikki Giovanni joins Krishnan Guru-Murthy to to talk about her life and work, how anger has fuelled her poetry at different stages of her life - touching on topics such as domestic abuse, segregation, Black Lives Matter and Donald Trump - and recounts her experience of the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre.
Produced by Silvia Maresca.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Ways to Change the World. I'm Christian Guru Murphy and this is the |
| 0:05.2 | podcast in which we talk to extraordinary people about the big ideas in their lives on the |
| 0:09.8 | events that have helped shape them. My guest this week is a poet, an activist. She was a |
| 0:16.7 | leaving light in the Black Arts Movement, the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and |
| 0:22.2 | 70s in America. |
| 0:24.0 | She became famous again as a long standing professor at Virginia Tech |
| 0:29.0 | because when that school in America was struck by a mass shooting carried out by a former student there. |
| 0:37.0 | She had been one of the teachers of that former student who had identified him in her words as evil. |
| 0:44.4 | She wrote a poem about him which touched many people across the world, |
| 0:49.2 | including the Queen of England. |
| 0:50.9 | Vicky Yvonne, thank you very much for joining. |
| 0:52.7 | I'm delighted to be here. |
| 0:55.1 | You've been angry at different points in your life, haven't you? |
| 0:58.6 | Yes, I have. |
| 1:00.0 | I never used to think that I was angry the older I got but I think there's still probably |
| 1:05.7 | a suspension of anger left. Well I mean I want us to talk about right now what makes you |
| 1:11.5 | angry right now? I really dislike Donald Trump. I don't |
| 1:15.2 | like Nazis, I never did. And I just like the way that people are trying to teach |
| 1:20.4 | hate because hate has to be taught and people forget that you don't wake up in the morning and |
| 1:26.3 | and say oh I'm gonna hate someone teaches you to hate. I mean as somebody who deals in the power of |
| 1:32.0 | words you used one of the most powerful |
| 1:34.2 | words right then right next to Donald Trump Nazi. Just explain to me why you |
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