There is something strangely inconsistent about a nation
and a press that would praise you when you say, "Be nonviolent toward Jim
Clark," but will curse and damn you when you say, "Be nonviolent
toward little brown Vietnamese children. There is something wrong with
that..."
~ MLK
Jim Clark |
It's become a TV ritual: Every year in mid-January, around
the time of Martin Luther King's birthday, we get perfunctory network news
reports about "the slain civil rights leader."
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).The remarkable thing about this annual review of King's life
is that several years — his last years — are totally missing.
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.
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.
By 1967, King had 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.
King called the United States "the greatest purveyor of
violence in the world today."
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 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. Life 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."1
King was murdered exactly one year following the Riverside
speech, on April 4, 1968.
1 Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon.
"You know they went after King
when he spoke out on
vietnam.
He turned the power to the have-nots,
and then came the shot" -- Rage
Against The Machine
"Wake Up"
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