MLK: A Call to Conscience

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Anyone watch this yet??
MLK: A Call to Conscience

The second episode of Tavis Smiley Reports examines Martin Luther King, Jr.'s stand against the Vietnam War and the influence of his legacy today. Tavis speaks with scholars and friends of King, including Cornel West, Vincent Harding and Susannah Heschel.

    This second installment of Tavis Smiley Reports examines the forgotten agenda of Martin Luther King Jr., whose famed "Beyond Vietnam" speech, given at Riverside Church in 1967, led to an abrupt loss of his popularity in the last year of his life.

The program explores the relevance of King's anti-war position to the current U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the significance of the Nobel Peace Prize, an honor bestowed upon both King and President Barack Obama.

Tavis Smiley Reports MLK: A Call to Conscience is based on dozens of hours of interviews with King's friends and with scholars who study his legacy, including:

    * Dr. Vincent Harding, drafter of the "Beyond Vietnam" speech
    * Clarence Jones, King's legal advisor
    * Dr. Cornel West, a leading expert on race in America
    * Dr. Susannah Heschel, daughter of activist Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel
    * Dr. Clayborne Carson, director of the King Institute at Stanford University
    * Marian Wright Edelman, Organizer for the Poor People's Campaign with King
    * Taylor Branch, Pulitzer Prize-winning King historian

King's closest advisors discuss the divisions within the civil rights movement over King's opposition to the war in Vietnam—and the political and public fallout from his criticism of American foreign policy.

Dr. Vincent Harding, who is co-credited with writing the "Beyond Vietnam" speech, tells Tavis that King's inner circle worried about the ramifications of the speech, both before and after he gave it.

"We were concerned, he was concerned, but he had really come to the point, as the speech is trying to say, where if he was to be a man of conscience, a man of compassion, he had to speak," said Dr. Harding.

He added, "But it was precisely one year to the day after this speech that that bullet which had been chasing him for a long time finally caught up with him. And I am convinced that that bullet had something to do with that speech."

    * istory.com
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Tavis Smiley reexamines the civil rights leader's 'Beyond Vietnam' address, which was sharply critical of U.S. foreign policy.
ON THE MEDIA
March 31, 2010|James Rainey

Toward the end of a mostly compelling and occasionally moving new documentary, Cornel West does his best to puncture the image of a benign and nonconfrontational Martin Luther King Jr.

West rejects what he calls the "Santa Clausification" of King, fuzzy myth-making that the African American scholar says is "one of the ways in which you defang and domesticate people who are on fire for justice."

"MLK: A Call to Conscience" works best when it tends to the words of the provocative West -- revealing a King who was both more troubled, more radical and, yes, even more courageous than standard hagiography typically has allowed.

The documentary, airing at 8 p.m. Wednesday on KCET, delivers a worthy glimpse of the feeling, thinking and struggling King, a year before the end of his life.

The program would have been even more successful had it probed deeper into King's psychological and political challenges from both left and right and tossed aside some diversions, particularly an off-target attempt to hold President Obama accountable to the King legacy.

Still, there's much to learn and admire in executive producer and host Tavis Smiley's effort. In the second of four documentaries that take him away from his regular PBS talk show, Smiley wisely reexamines one of King's speeches not favored in YouTube mashups and glowing celebrations of the '60s.

An address King called "Beyond Vietnam" has been judged by historians and King allies (who carry much of the narrative here) as his most audacious, challenging not only the Vietnam War but what King believed was a heavy-handed foreign policy and a skewed domestic agenda.

Smiley reports that King's already strained relationship with President Lyndon B. Johnson, his onetime civil rights ally, became "fractured beyond repair" after he delivered the speech on April 4, 1967 at Riverside Church in New York City.

One year to the day later, King would be shot down at a motel in Memphis, Tenn., where he had gone to support striking sanitation workers. Smiley and King's associates from that time -- including Harry Belafonte and Marian Wright Edelman -- describe how he decided to speak out despite tremendous pressure not to stray from economic and social issues on U.S. soil.

The minister looked sad and troubled that night in the standing-room-only church. He told the crowd that "the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony." But he said that "my conscience leaves me no other choice. A time comes when silence is betrayal."