Martin Luther King, Jr. Too real for TV

[Bandwraith at aol.com]

"Today is Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Day. He was born in 1929. Last week, 
he would have turned 75 years old. 

It's become a TV ritual: Every year in mid-January, around the time of 
his birthday, we get perfunctory network news reports about "the slain 
civil rights leader." 

The remarkable thing about this annual review of King's life is that 
several years -- his last years -- are totally missing, as if flushed down 
a memory hole. What TV viewers see is a closed loop of familiar file 
footage: King battling desegregation in Birmingham (1963); reciting 
his dream of racial harmony at the rally in Washington (1963); marching 
for voting rights in Selma, Alabama (1965); and finally, lying dead on the 
motel balcony in Memphis (1968). 

An alert viewer might notice that the chronology jumps from 1965 to 1968. 
Yet King didn't take a sabbatical near the end of his life. In fact, he was 
speaking and organizing as diligently as ever. Almost all of those speeches
 were filmed or taped. But they're not shown today on TV. 

In the early 1960s, when King focused his challenge on legalized racial 
discrimination in the South, most major media were his allies. Network 
TV and national publications graphically showed the police dogs and 
bullwhips and cattle prods used against Southern blacks who sought 
the right to vote or to eat at a public lunch counter. But after passage of 
civil rights acts in 1964 and 1965, King began challenging the nation's 
fundamental priorities. He maintained that civil rights laws were empty 
without "human rights" -- including economic rights. For people too poor 
to eat at a restaurant or afford a decent home, King said, 
anti-discrimination 
laws were hollow. 

Noting that a majority of Americans below the poverty line were white, King 
developed a class perspective. He decried the huge income gaps between 
rich and poor, and called for "radical changes in the structure of our 
society" 
to redistribute wealth and power. 

By 1967, King had also become the country's most prominent opponent 
of the Vietnam War, and a staunch critic of overall U.S. foreign policy, 
which 
he deemed militaristic. In his "Beyond Vietnam" speech delivered at New 
York's Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 -- a year to the day before he was 
murdered -- King called the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence 
in the world today." 

Time magazine called the speech "demagogic slander that sounded like a 
script for Radio Hanoi," and the Washington Post declared that King had 
"diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people." 

Martin Luther King. His speech Beyond Vietnam, delivered on April 4, 1967 a 
year to the day before he was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, 
Tennessee. On the day of King's assassination, Robert Kennedy was in 
Indianapolous, Indiana campaigning for president. He announced the 
assassination of Martin Luther King on April 4, 1968. The night before he was 
killed, King gave his last major address in Memphis, Tennessee. He was there 
to support striking sanitation workers as he built momentum for a Poor 
Peoples 
March on Washington. Here is Martin Luther King 'I Have Been to the Mountain 
Top.' "

Hear it all, at:

    http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/01/19/1630238

respectfully