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 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." (Full
text/audio here:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2564.htm)
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. 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 40 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.
___________________________________________
Co-written by Jeff Cohen. Jeff Cohen is the author of "Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in
Corporate Media." Norman Solomon's book "War Made Easy: How Presidents and
Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death" is out in paperback.
