DO THEY REALLY HAVE TO DIG UP HIS SKELETONS?:

The Martin Luther King You Don't See on TV (Norman Solomon and Jeff Cohen, 4/04/07, AlterNet)

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.

Indeed, when he ceased to appeal to American values he ceased to be a factor in American political life. We generally hush up his later years out of respect for the earlier.

MORE:
Dr. King's "Beyond Vietnam" Speech 40 Years Later (Rose Marie Berger, Sojourners)

On April 4, 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave one of the most important speeches in American history at Riverside Church in New York City. In it he decisively and prophetically extended his public ministry beyond narrowly defined civil rights by calling for an end to the U.S. war in Vietnam. "'A time comes when silence is betrayal,'" preached King. "That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam."

The Riverside speech (variously called "Beyond Vietnam" or "Breaking the Silence") names the sickness eating the American soul as "the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism." It was a watershed moment in American history. A year later - to the day - Dr. King was assassinated.

King's address was drafted for him by his friend, and historian, Dr. Vincent G. Harding. King made minor changes, but essentially he delivered Harding's original text.

African American History and Culture Holdings (Emory University)

Emory's African American collections are strong in Black Print Culture, the world of literature created by and for, and often published within, the African American community from the early 19th century through the 20th century.

Emory collects African American-published books, pamphlets, periodicals, sheet music, broadsides, and printed ephemera in all fields. It also holds the papers of publishers, editors, journalists, and distributors of print culture, as well as material related to publishing history, including adverts, book notices, and salesman's samples.

Building on a long-standing collecting focus on American communism and the political Left, Emory holds important papers of African American social and political activists. These include the papers of Harlem Renaissance figure and campaigner for civil rights and international human rights, Louise Thompson Patterson; papers of her close friends and West Coast political activists Matt and Evelyn Graves Crawford; and important materials of their lifelong friend, Langston Hughes. Papers of social and political activists of the later 20th century include those of Vincent G. Harding, a founder of the Institute of the Black World; Doris A. Derby, co-founder of the Free Southern Theatre; Elaine Brown, the only woman to head the Black Panther Party; and SNCC activists Joan C. Browning and Constance W. Curry.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 5, 2007 10:59 AM