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Martin Luther King, Jr. in His Own Words: "Beyond Vietnam"
and I Have Been to the Mountaintop"
8:01-8:19 Martin Luther King, Jr. in His Own Words:
"Beyond Vietnam" and I Have Been to the Mountaintop"
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 QUOTE "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."
8:58-8:59 Outro and Credits
For a copy of today’s program, call 1 (800) 881 2359.
Our website is www.democracynow.org.
Our email address is mail@democracynow.org.
Democracy Now! is produced by Mike Burke, Sharif Abdel Kouddous,
Ana Nogueira, Elizabeth Press, Jeremy Scahill and Parvez Sharma.
Mike Di Filippo is our engineer.
Thanks also to Uri Galed, Angela Alston, Orlando Richards,
Simba Russeau, Johnny Sender, Rich Kim, Joe Murgio, John Randolph,
Chris Zucker, Karen Ranucci, Denis Moynihan, Eric Rweyemamu,
Jenny Filipazzo and Isis Phillips.
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