The Martin Luther King Thread

of course i saw eyes on the prize! i'd like to see it again though, that was a long time ago. it's REALLY weird to think that more time has passed since that documentary was aired than had passed between it and the events it was talking about.

It works in part because it's a 6-hour series (and only covers up to '65).

I've checked out the first two parts. An excellent companion to the Taylor Branch books.

There's an Eyes On The Prize II that goes to the 1970s (I think). Long unavailable, though. First aired in 1988.

agreed about the actor readings -- pretty dated and kinda embarrassing.

I'd like to see all the footage of King speaking and marching that is extant. Filmed Record has that angry white Chicago mob in it, right?

Speaking of actors, Variety piece on the showbiz contingent at the March.

The 50 or so actors and performers who attended — Sammy Davis Jr., Marlon Brando, Lena Horne, James Garner, Charlton Heston, Gregory Peck, Paul Newman, Sidney Poitier, Diahann Carroll to name a few — were “partly responsible for bringing a relaxed and peaceful ‘county fair’ mood to the huge demonstration,” as Variety’s Mike Mosettig, then just 21 years old, wrote. But Mosettig, now a producer for PBS, also noted that Harry Belafonte, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, read a statement from the show biz that warned of “artistic sterility” if all Americans aren’t given freedom and discrimination didn’t come to an end. Without that, Belafonte read, “growth of the artist is seriously menaced.”

...Garner, in his autobiography, said that the FBI called each celebrity one by one the night before, warning them to stay away, “saying they couldn’t guarantee our safety.”

There also was disagreement among the show biz contingent on exactly what they should do and say once they got there. Before they left Los Angeles on a chartered plane, Garner wrote, then Screen Actors Guild president Heston presided over a planning meeting where Brando held up a cattle prod that had been used against demonstrators in Gadsden, Alabama.

“Marlon wanted us to chain ourselves to the Lincoln Memorial,” Garner wrote. “Chuck didn’t like that. He said we should play by the rules and threatened to bail out of the march if we did any ‘militant’ stuff. Marlon shut up and we did it Chuck’s way.”...

Josephine Baker “disavowed for one day her pledge never to return to the U.S. and flew in from Paris,” Variety reported. Wearing a blue uniform of the free French, she praised the racially mixed crowd for being “together as salt and pepper just as you should be. You are a unified people at last.” Dick Gregory quipped to the estimated 200,000 gathered, “The last time I saw this many of us, Bull Connor was doing all the talking.”

http://variety.com/2013/voices/columns/when-marlon-brando-marched-with-charlton-heston-how-variety-covered-the-march-on-washington-1200589376/

http://www.smh.com.au/ffximage/2008/04/06/heston_brando_gallery__589x400.jpg

Garner, in his autobiography, said that the FBI called each celebrity one by one the night before, warning them to stay away, “saying they couldn’t guarantee our safety.”

lolololololol

Filmed Record has that angry white Chicago mob in it, right?

yes -- one of the most chilling things i've ever seen. there's a clip from MLK saying it's worse than anything he encountered in the south.

nippers like me should watch this meet the press clip to have it brought home just how condescendingly concern-trolling the enlightened yankees were re: MLK; every single question (that isn't about noted COMMIE! bayard rustin) is about how Well Don't You Think There's Likely To Be A Lot Of Violence? Don't You Think You're Pushing Too Hard? Shouldn't You Allow The Country Time To Get Used To The Advances We've Already Made?

I wonder if they called James Baldwin... xxp

Haven't watched it yet but there's a CBS roundtable at the end of the Variety page.

Liberals this week have been particularly good at noting the bad faith and cowardice of their white predecessors.

Chris Hayes a few days ago too

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/30/a-colored-mans-constitution/?_r=1&utm_source=buffer&utm_campaign=Buffer&utm_content=buffera00f4&utm_medium=twitter&

wasn't sure what thread to put this in, but since there have been posts itt recently due to the march's 50th anniversary, this'll do. a (former?) slave in 1863 writes an 8-page re-interpretation of the constitution

in his memoir Heston, who called his appearance at the March the highlight of his life, hesitated before appearing with a "far left" Negro writer like James Baldwin, a man who once titled a book The Fire Next Time.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/opinion/constitution.pdf

this is the full pdf btw

I'm sure if Dr. King were around today he'd have plenty of work to do : I still see institutional racism even in self-styled "integrated" environments. In health care and educational institutions, whites are over-represented at the top and while they may pay lip service to the Civil Rights Movement, they simply don't have to devote as much of their time to it. There is no excuse for the sub-standard services black communities get.

Also it would have been quite something to see Dr. King talk about The African-American Civil Rights Movement across the globe!

Not gonna be hearing any US pols quoting this.

There must be better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism. Call it what you may, call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all of God's children.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/obery-m-hendricks-jr-phd/the-uncompromising-anti-capitalism-of-martin-luther-king-jr_b_4629609.html

Or this stuff (which is excellent reading and gives you a strong sense of what the late sixties were like):

http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/encyclopedia/documentsentry/doc_beyond_vietnam/

At the same time, those sentiments were becoming mainstream during Vietnam (in some parts of the country). Now this kind of stuff is taboo again.

http://vimeo.com/11154217

"There are forty million poor people here, and one day we must ask the question, 'Why are there forty million poor people in America?' And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising a question about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I'm simply saying that more and more, we've got to begin to ask questions about the whole society. We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life's marketplace. But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. It means that questions must be raised. And you see, my friends, when you deal with this you begin to ask the question, 'Who owns the oil?' You begin to ask the question, 'Who owns the iron ore?' You begin to ask the question, 'Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that's two-thirds water?' These are words that must be said."

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B7pLYOZCUAIFzyw.jpg

ugh fuck the south

Awesome Taylor Branch interview covering MLK's enthusiastic nonviolence:

And as a result there are a number of things people misunderstand about King and nonviolence. For one thing it’s not the same as Mahatma Gandhi’s “passive resistance.”

“King had a little trouble with the Gandhians” and their incessant fasting, says Branch, who decided to edit out several hundred pages of his manuscript dealing with the Gandhians. “He was over there in India and he said for them the test of your commitment was whether you could fast. He used to joke, ‘Gandhi obviously never tasted barbecue.’”

Passive resistance, Branch points out, was easier in a country where 95 percent of the people were your natural supporters, as in India, versus America, where you’re only 10 percent—and a good portion of the rest were actively hostile. Instead King’s nonviolence depended on being active, using demonstrations, direct actions, to “amplify the message” of the protest they were making, even if it meant sacrificing their own lives and limbs to do it.

link?

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-weve-forgotten-about-martin-luther-king-devotion-nonviolence-180953639/?all&no-ist

oops. Thanks.

OMG Robert E. Lee. Let's celebrate treason!

I did not know Stevie Wonder had a hand in this:

https://medium.com/cuepoint/how-stevie-wonder-helped-create-martin-luther-king-day-807451a78664

King otm. A great man. The world needs more like him.

weird and uncanny that a holiday celebrating maybe the best american ever coincides with a holiday celebrating one of the worst

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-sirota/what-santa-clausifying-dr_b_809951.html

OMG Robert E. Lee. Let's celebrate treason!

― SCOTTISH PEOPLE ONLY (I M Losted), Monday, January 19, 2015 11:35 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah, they do that down there. always have...

An online game I was playing announced, "I have a dream!", offering a holiday discount on playing chips.

In the end, if the holiday gets people interested, I can't complain. It just makes you wonder about corporate America when they exploit it without apology.

Also, if they're going to observe treason, they look foolish berating lefties for their lack of loyalty.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wv3UdAtx028

Today's google doodle is a little awkwardly realized. Not that I think there's anything o_O about it, just kind of forced to spelle Google at the expense of actually being a good image of MLK.

https://www.google.com/logos/doodles/2016/martin-luther-king-jr-day-2016-4899278629634048-hp.jpg

in that speech he repeatedly calls out "Democratic Party patronage" and "the Daley machine." Didn't the man know about LESSER EVILS???

also opens with a Klan joke

happy MLK day.

i visited the King Center last month when a friend visited from out of town. finally got to sit down in Ebeneezer Baptist Church, so beautiful. if anyone makes a trip down there today be sure you stop by the Sweet Auburn Curb Market right down the street.

We went to the King memorial in Washington this morning - nice to see people there in spite of a cold windy day. One of my companions still can't get past the fact that the job went to a Chinese sculptor (couldn't get a black person, or an American?). Noted that they've buffed off all evidence of the controversial "drum major" quote from the statue.

"What is that goddamned ****** preacher doing to me?" - LBJ

https://theintercept.com/2017/01/16/what-the-santa-clausification-of-martin-luther-king-jr-leaves-out/

Kennedy aides finally scheduled King's private audience with the President early on a weekend morning. Then, having secured King's acceptance, they sandwiched him between an even earlier presidential meeting with Roy Wilkins and a later one with all the major civil rights leaders ... Only then did Kenneth O'Donnell notify King that he was expected to stay on for the larger meeting, which White House press officials presented publicly as the major story ... Taking the best he could get, King kept his White House appointment on Saturday, June 22.

While Roy Wilkins met first with President Kennedy, [Asst. Atty. Gen] Burke Marshall gathered privately with King and several SCLC aides ... Marshall took King aside for one of those urgently confidential government discussions ... King could no longer defer the threat of Communist infiltration in the SCLC, Marshall warned. Specifically, he must sever relations with Stanley Levison, who was a Communist functionary, and with Jack O'Dell, whom Levison had "planted" ... King's first reaction was to shrug in amused disbelief ... When he tried to tell Marshall that there must be some mistake, some confusion perhaps between an outright Communist and a person who had sympathized with Marxist tenets, Marshall contradicted him. This was not paranoid mush, he said, but hard intelligence from the very pinnacle of the U.S. government. Levison ... was "a paid agent of the Soviet Communist apparatus" ... When King asked to see proof, the point Marshall stressed was that neither he nor King was in a position to second-guess the highest U.S. national security experts, and even if they were ... the controlling fact was that President Kennedy was about to "put his whole political life on the line" with the civil rights bill, and the President simply could not make himself vulnerable to charges of Communist association.

Seeing from King's face that he was not convinced, Marshall was obliged to deliver him straightaway to Robert Kennedy for another round on the same subject. The initiative for these confrontations had come from the Attorney General, who had called J. Edgar Hoover the previous Monday to arrange a special FBI briefing on just how dramatic and explicit he could make the new warning to King ... Hoover was only too happy to comply ... For once, Kennedy was pushing Hoover about the threat of domestic subversion instead of vice versa. Now the Attorney General found it worth paying tribute to Hoover in order to gain a measure of control over King. Here was a man who was boring in on the White House, threatening to deform or destroy its domestic political base, and yet he held no public office, displayed no personal ambitions that could be traded on, succeeded by methods such as going to jail, and thrived on the very upheavals that most unsettled the Administration... With King talking of a demonstration that might turn the capital into a giant Birmingham, Robert Kennedy ... would gain a bargaining hold if King admitted his movement was poisoned.

But King shrugged off Robert Kennedy too. He kept asking for proof, saying that these terrible spy terms did not ring true of the men he had known so well ... Everybody he knew in the movement had been called a Communist for years, himself included. People across the South were calling even Robert Kennedy a Communist ... Kennedy insisted that this was different ... Levison's true nature was even more fiendish than he was being allowed to tell King, and ... evidence came from the highest and most sophisticated machinery of American espionage ... To King, however, these state secrets only fed the spiral of disbelief. The higher Kennedy reached for authority, the less his descriptions sounded like the Levinson whom King knew. The more Kennedy evoked the omniscience of the government's central brain, the more that brain sounded like an ordinary segregationist....

When King walked into the Oval Office, President Kennedy asked him to take a private stroll outdoors in the Rose Garden. When they were alone he said, "I assume you know you're under very close surveillance." King said little in reply.... The President's manner employed the most potent combination of power and intimacy to warn that King could have no secrets....

The President put a hand on his shoulder and almost whispered that he had to "get rid of" Levison and O'Dell. "They're Communists," Kennedy said. When King replied that he was not sure what that meant, as Hoover considered a great many people Communists, President Kennedy came back instantly with specifics ... Stanley Levison's position was too highly classified for him to give details, but the President could say that Levison was O'Dell's "handler" ... These were the hard facts, said Kennedy. O'Dell was fully engaged in conspiracy as the "number five Communist in the United States."

"I don't know how he's got time to do all that," [King] managed to reply. "He's got two jobs with me...." Kennedy stressed the international implications of the threat by declaring that both Levison and O'Dell were "agents of a foreign power...." [King] said he would need to see proof before he could believe such things of these men.

President Kennedy took another tack. "You've read about Profumo in the papers?" he asked... the British Secretary of State for War had given his name to a sensational scandal by first denying, then admitting, that he had carried on an extramarital affair with a gorgeous lady of the night ... who was simultaneously romancing a Soviet diplomat ... The ongoing revelations obsessed President Kennedy to the point that he had ordered all State Department cables on the Profumo case sent to him at full length, without summary.... Kennedy warned King that sudden explosions from the underworld of sex and spying could ruin public men.... Truth was only part of the equation.... King must not let his personal esteem for Levison blind him to the enormous stakes he was playing for.... "If they shoot you down, they'll shoot us down, too," Kennedy told King. "So we're asking you to be careful...."

King said he still would like to see some proof ... Rather than extend further appeals to King's trust, [Kennedy] broke off the discussion and led the way back inside from the Rose Garden.

O'Dell is still with us - 93yo, living in Vancouver.

:)

Hoover's dead, cardiac event. RFK and JFK both died by assassination. Only one of them has a day. History: occasionally just.

I love the juxtaposition going on in that. All four big time American dudes from the history DLH excerpts above are dead. One died alone and unloved by anyone, from a heart attack, the rest of the US sigh of relief, etc. the building named after him is falling apart.

Three were assassinated. Two were Kennedys. One was president, the other would have been.

The last one was black, from Alabama.

i think abt this story a lot cuz it is so weirdly like a fairy tale -- the three encounters, each at a deeper level of the maze, the talisman of "show me it's true" met each time with "we can't show you, that's how true it is" until it's met in the garden at the center with "don't you understand -- it doesn't matter if it's true." the hero leaves a hero, having stood up under all the power there is, but he is still troubled by what he heard in the garden: truth is only part of the equation. if they shoot you down, they'll shoot us down too.

anyway the above is from vol 1 of taylor branch's MLK trilogy, which is as major as caro's johnson (lol) if a lot denser; every1 should read it. happy american pride day.

Thanking u dlh (and the others here who've apparently mentioned it over the years) for introducing me to The King Years. Started reading volume one this weekend and that is pretty much all I did this weekend. It's clearly an important historical text but it also seems like a pretty crucial guidebook for navigating the landscape of today.

glad! yeah among other things it is an excellent ~movement history~, v focused on tactics and responses and day-by-day events and a cast of hundreds whose synthesized interviews (check the endnotes, these are practically an oral history) are where the narrative voice is coming from. completely immersive but yes u feel the tether the whole time.

vol2 doubles as a malcolm x bio (+ history of NOI) and is my favorite, also of course feat.s the always-welcome character LBJ in strong supporting role. vol3 is fucking wrenching, if not the best book i've read about the late 60s then the richest.

also find it kinda uh, historiographically revelatory, that it is always at the same time a great-man history (my post above: big men talking in rooms) and a social history, one that's rly focused on collective action and the contexts that create movement (and on individuals whose names you don't already know). would admire this combination in any book but it's particularly apropos in this one, reinforces its themes, etc.. honestly the trilogy it reminds me of is trotsky's history of the revolution.

Need to ready Taylor Branch's bio.

― lumber up, limbaugh down (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, January 16, 2012 6:38 PM

I've fixed this.