The Martin Luther King Not Seen on TV

So, I was thinking, nimh. Maybe you should write something on the last years of Dr. King.

Just remember, you can't use any taped or TV footage (copyrighted), nor any direct quotes (copyrighted), nor any portions of his speeches (copyrighted).

Well, you can...you just have to cough up a few bucks

I think MLK was a great man, but I can see how some people thought he was a communist.

I'm fine with people being against the vietnam war, but is it true that he spoke admirably about the north vietnemese???

Edgar
Edgar, unfortunately, M.L. King's crusade did more to move southern White racists into the Republican Party after the Dixiecrat movement failed to mature.

This says more about the Republican Party than it does about King.

BBB

Wikipedia

Chicago
In 1966, after several successes in the South, King and other people in the civil rights organizations tried to spread the movement to the North, with Chicago as its first target. King and Ralph Abernathy moved into its slums on purpose as an educational experience and to demonstrate their support and empathy for the poor. They were both rather middle class folks, well-educated and of decent means, so they had to figure some way to connect.

Abernathy could not stand the slums and secretly moved out after a short period. King stayed and wrote about how Coretta and his children suffered emotional problems from the horrid conditions, inability to play outside.

In Chicago, Abernathy would later write, they received a worse reception than they had received in the south. Thrown bottles and screaming throngs met their marches and they were truly afraid of starting a riot. King had always felt a responsibility to the people he was leading to not unnecessarily stage a violent event, something rather unique to him as a radical social leader of the 1960s or any other decade. If King had intimations that a peaceful march would be put down with violence he would call it off for the safety of people. But he himself still faced death many a time by marching at the front in the face of death threats to his person. And in Chicago the violence was so formidable, it shook the two friends.

But worse than the violence was the two-facedness of the city leaders. Abernathy and King secured agreements on action to be taken, but this action was largely bureaucratically killed after-the-fact by politicians within mayor Richard J. Daley's corrupt machine. Some of their small successes such as Operation Breadbasket, did not translate into anything as large as the desegregation cases of the bus boycott in the South. However, they did light the fire of ideas like Affirmative Action and organizing labor as legitimate techniques in the minds of the people.

When King and his allies returned to the South, they left Jesse Jackson, then a young Chicago activist, in charge of their organization. While Jackson had a great deal of heart and oratorical skill, he knew very little about running an organization. They asked him for financial information, and he sent them a bag of unorganized receipts. Chicago could be seen as a point where the civil rights movement lost its momentum and began to fade to a shadow of what King had planned for it.

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Further challenges

King giving a speechStarting in 1965, King began to express doubts about the United States' role in the Vietnam War. On April 4, 1967 -- exactly one year before his death -- King spoke out strongly against the US's role in the war, insisting that the US was in Vietnam "to occupy it as an American colony" and calling the US government "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." But he also argued that the country needed larger and broader moral changes:

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: "This is not just." [8]
King was long hated by many white southern segregationists, but this speech turned the more mainstream media against him. TIME called the speech "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi (a propaganda radio station run by the North Vietnamese Army during the Vietnam War)", and the Washington Post declared that King had "diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people."

The speech was a reflection of King's evolving political advocacy in his later years. He began to speak of the need for fundamental changes in the political and economic life of the nation. Toward the end of his life, King more frequently expressed his opposition to the war and his desire to see a redistribution of resources to correct racial and economic injustice. Though his public language was guarded, so as to avoid being linked to communism by his political enemies, in private he sometimes spoke of his support for democratic socialism:

You can't talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can't talk about ending the slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums. You're really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with captains of industry.... Now this means that we are treading in difficult water, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong... with capitalism.... There must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism. (Frogmore, S.C. November 14, 1966. Speech in front of his staff.)
King also stated in his "Beyond Vietnam" speech that "True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring." From Vietnam to South Africa to Latin America, King said, the U.S. was "on the wrong side of a world revolution." King questioned "our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America," and asked why the U.S. was suppressing revolutions "of the shirtless and barefoot people" in the Third World, instead of supporting them.

In 1968, King and the SCLC organized the "Poor People's Campaign" to address issues of economic justice. The campaign culminated in a march on Washington, D.C. demanding economic aid to the poorest communities of the United States. He crisscrossed the country to assemble "a multiracial army of the poor" that would descend on Washington -- engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience at the Capitol, if need be -- until Congress enacted a poor people's bill of rights. Reader's Digest warned of an "insurrection."

King's economic bill of rights called for massive government jobs programs to rebuild America's cities. He saw a crying need to confront a Congress that had demonstrated its "hostility to the poor" -- appropriating "military funds with alacrity and generosity," but providing "poverty funds with miserliness."

On April 3, 1968, King prophetically told a euphoric crowd:

It really doesn't matter what happens now.... some began to... talk about the threats that were out -- what would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers.... Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place, but I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over, and I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. And so I'm happy tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.
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Assassination

The Lorraine Motel, where Rev. King was assassinated, now the site of the National Civil Rights MuseumKing was assassinated the next evening, April 4, 1968, at 6:01 PM, on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, while preparing to lead a local march in support of the heavily black Memphis sanitation workers' union which was on strike at the time. Friends inside the motel room heard the shot fired and ran to the balcony to find King shot in the throat. He was pronounced dead at St. Joseph's hospital at 7:05 PM . The assassination led to a nationwide wave of riots in more than 60 cities. Four days later, President Lyndon Johnson declared a national day of mourning for the lost civil rights leader. A crowd of 300,000 attended his funeral that same day.

Inspirational sh*t right there. Good example of people using religion for good. Listening to some people on here, I would have thought that was impossible.

The right bastardizes King's message more every year. To hear them tell it, his main legacy is an admonition to color-blindness, which is very far from the truth, but serves their bizarre "affirmative access", trickle-down idea of a nation.

Edgar's point that the mainstream media runs like their hair is aflame from the more controversial aspects of King's message is well taken. They wear out the same old tired "been to the mountaintop", "I have a dream" footage until it loses all context and meaning, jam it into the same 60 days that include MLK day and "Black History Month", then continue the lockstep coverage which gives Britney and Keith as much coverage as torture and taxcuts.

They don't want to dwell on, or let us hear about, the way King was eloquently outspoken against the Vietnam war - hell, if we could hear that, it might occur to us that he probably wouldn't think very highly about some things going on right now.

But expect the rightie apologists to continue to try to obfuscate that; after all, they can't co-opt King's real message - they have to twist it first.

Personally, I thought more highly of him BEFORE I knew about all that. But that's just me.

Er....if JW is correct, how come ANY speeches are shown?

What is the difference between paying for speeches from one set of years and not another?

Considering they apparently have no trouble recounting the years up to 1965, why should it suddenly be impossible to spend more attention on the years after?

I mean, do you see any way in which the dollar question you raise explains the dichotomy Edgar points out in the attention paid to his earlier resp later years? The cost for speeches etc applies to either period, right, so how does it come into play, in your view, in explaining why one period gets more attention than the other?

If it doesnt, then whats the relevancy here of the point you make?

Right on.

Smart fish.

Well, I'm sure there are others besides Mr. Mullane (the author of the article I posted) who regard the actions of the King family towards his material to be affecting his legacy. As the article points out, the family has successfully sued several news outlets and one can only imagine how tedious that could be. Some teachers feel their students are losing out by only getting to view the written text of Dr. King's speeches (recognizing how powerful the videos are), but they're afraid of being sued (even using the written text). <Shrug>

Maybe the thought of being tied up in courts being sued just isn't worth it to some people. Maybe it's a vast conspiracy. Maybe you should ask Dexter(If you make a dollar, I should make a dime)King.


By the way - the article I posted wasn't a direct rebuttal of the article posted by Edgar. Edgar's article by FAIR.org was written more than 10 years ago.

Hmmm. I was more partial to his "rat" persona

Sigh
JW, it wouldn't matter if the article were written this morning or the day after the assassination. And the damned recorded speaches have nothing to do with the topic of the thread, which is the media refusing to recognize the entirety of the King legacy. I feel that you are smart enough to know this and therefore will no longer respond to such statements.

You know, (and this is a digression, too, sorry!) King had an influence far beyond US society.



His example and mehods were used very powerfully by Aboriginal activists here.....there were "freedom rides" against discrimination here, too.


An Aboriginal activist called Charles Perkins was very instrumental in organising these.

He used to come in to a coffee shop I worked in sometimes, and he never realised how much free stuff he and his friends got....heehee, I used to pay for it, considering it a tiny way in which I could support their work...


I know it is dumb, but I was very aware of his using King's ideas, and it was great to talk with Perkins...it felt a tiny bit as though I had a connection with King himself, in a small, dumb way.

currently we don't like King because his family turned out to be capitalists.

Zinger.



I like it.

If you haven't already, you should try to watch the Meet the Press program for today, though.

http://video.msn.com/v/us/v.htm?f=00&t=m5&g=e10461f7-89e1-415c-aa58-80d1b6f8066e&p=angietest

The second segment is excellent, with Tim Russert interviewing several authors, including Taylor Branch who wrote At Canaan's Edge - America in the King Years 1965-1968.

I also think a simple Google search will turn up quite a bit written about that time period in Dr King's life. My search (over 10,000 articles) turned up some interesting looking results, including books, essays and articles.

I don't think the media is purposely ignoring Dr. King, so we'll just have to disagree on that. JFK's speeches were, I'd guess, equally famous from around that same time period, yet I don't see the media spotlighting them, either, and they're still in the public domain. Dr. King's are not.

Sorry to interrupt the conspiracy mumblings...again.

Once more, JW: We are talking about the mass media, not internet searches. The news the average person in America pays attention to. I can find thousands of hits on Napoleon, but that has about the same relevance as what you are saying.

let's face it edgar

film of cops setting dogs on black people and pics of segregated drinking fountains makes for better tv than the vietnam war, or vaguely socialist ideas about how the government should treat people

the former lets you say, look how far we've come, we are great people

the latter, well, no one wants to bring up vietnam in this day and age, and as for social programs, what are you a commie or something