[A-List] The Martin Luther King You Don't See on TV

[Bill Totten <shimogamo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

by Norman Solomon and Jeff Cohen

ZNet Commentary (April 16 2007)


It's become a TV ritual: Every year on April 4, as Americans commemorate Martin
Luther King's death, we get perfunctory network news reports about "the slain
civil rights leader".

The remarkable thing about these reviews 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.

Why?

It's because national news media have never come to terms with what Martin
Luther King Jr stood for during his final years.

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.

"True compassion", King declared, "is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; 
it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring".

By 1967, King had also become the country's most prominent opponent of the
Vietnam War, and a staunch critic of overall US 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". Full
text/audio are at: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2564.htm

From Vietnam to South Africa to Latin America, King said, the US was "on the
wrong side of a world revolution". King questioned "our alliance with the landed
gentry of Latin America", and asked why the US was suppressing revolutions "of
the shirtless and barefoot people" in the Third World, instead of supporting
them.

In foreign policy, King also offered an economic critique, complaining about
"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".

You haven't heard the "Beyond Vietnam" speech on network news retrospectives,
but national media heard it loud and clear back in 1967 - and loudly denounced
it. Time magazine called it "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for
Radio Hanoi". The Washington Post patronized that "King has diminished his
usefulness to his cause, his country, his people".

In his last months, King was organizing the most militant project of his life:
the Poor People's Campaign. 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".

How familiar that sounds today, nearly forty years after King's efforts on
behalf of the poor people's mobilization were cut short by an assassin's bullet.

In 2007, in this nation of immense wealth, the White House and most in Congress
continue to accept the perpetuation of poverty. They fund foreign wars with
"alacrity and generosity", while being miserly in dispensing funds for education
and healthcare and environmental cleanup.

And those priorities are largely unquestioned by mainstream media.  No surprise
that they tell us so little about the last years of Martin Luther King's life.

_____

Jeff Cohen is the author of Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in
Corporate Media (Polipoint Press, 2006).

Norman Solomon's book War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us
to Death (John Wiley & Sons, 2006) is out in paperback.


http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2007-04/16solomon-cohen.cfm


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