AMY GOODMAN: It was 50 years ago today when
Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in
Memphis, Tennessee, just 39 years old.
We turn now to a conversation I recently had
with Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Taylor
Branch and with writer Trey Ellis.
They both worked on the new HBO documentary
called King in the Wilderness, which premiered
at Sundance, where we spoke, but went on HBO
this week.
The film recalls the last three years of King’s
life, beginning after President Lyndon Johnson
signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
I began by talking to Taylor Branch, who wrote
the America in the King Years trilogy.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s talk about those last
three years, where Dr. King is moving north.
And he would say, at that time, he was never
so afraid as he was in Chicago.
I mean, for all that he faced in the South,
Chicago—
TAYLOR BRANCH: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: —the Northern United States.
TAYLOR BRANCH: Well, within a month of Selma,
in 1965, he was saying, “We have to go north.”
And the staff, including Diane, did not want
him to go, did not want to go north.
“We still have work to do in the South.”
That’s what she said.
But King became more determined.
He was reluctant in the early years.
He was trying to make the movement climb up.
He gets the Nobel Peace Prize.
Andy Young said, “We wanted to have chicken
dinners and congratulate ourselves for 20
years.”
He says, “No, we want to go to Selma.”
As soon as Selma was done, he says, “We
want to go north to show America that the
race issue has never—is not, and never has
been, purely Southern.”
And the staff didn’t want to go.
Then he—all the staff, except for one person,
was against his coming out and making the
Riverside Church speech against Vietnam.
And none of the staff—the film shows how
much staff dissension there was on the Poor
People’s Campaign, and then on Memphis.
So, there was a downward pull of King in the
last years, where he felt compelled to make
a witness on things that he didn’t have
confidence were going to be big breakthrough
moments like “I Have a Dream” or the Civil
Rights Act of 1965.
So, he’s in the wilderness, and he’s lonely,
but he is much more of a leader, almost a
possessed leader.
“We have to do this.”
He even made a speech to his staff saying,
“We have to finish.
There’s a quote in Revelation: 'We have
to finish on our principles, even if we have
very little left.'”
AMY GOODMAN: Can you take us on the trajectory
of the Mississippi March—this is after the
Selma to Montgomery March, this is James Meredith—and
why King decided to join this, through the
whole challenge by Stokely Carmichael, who
would later become Kwame Ture?
Some incredible footage there of them publicly
sort of feuding, or it was more a battle of
ideas of who should be included in the march.
But start with Meredith.
TAYLOR BRANCH: Well, the Meredith March was
a watershed in the public perception of the
movement.
It was the birth of Black Power.
Stokely had just taken over the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee from John Lewis.
Lewis was ousted because he was too much like
Martin Luther King, too steadfast in nonviolence.
And when Meredith got shot, Dr. King and Stokely
were thrown together in continuing his march
through Mississippi.
AMY GOODMAN: And explain what happened to
James Meredith.
TAYLOR BRANCH: James Meredith was—had his
own solo March Against Fear to try to inspire
black Mississippians, who were afraid to go
to the courthouse to register to vote after
the Voting Rights Act.
And he said, “If I can march through Mississippi
by myself, then you shouldn’t be afraid
to register.”
But on the third day out, he was shot by white
people who were angry that he was trying to
rally black people to vote.
And civil rights leaders, many of whom weren’t—they
weren’t consulted about this march, but
they felt they had to continue it, because
it was so public.
And it threw Dr. King together with the new
SNCC leader, Stokely.
And Stokely said, openly, that he used the
fact that all the press came with Dr. King
to announce this new doctrine to make the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
not be so much second fiddle.
They had always felt Dr. King got all the
publicity, and they were spending more time
in jail.
And he pronounced this new doctrine: “We
want Black Power!”
And it mesmerized the media.
To this day, I mean, it’s more popular.
There are a lot of nonviolent movement veterans
who are embarrassed that they were nonviolent,
because Black Power became so popular.
And Dr. King would argue with Stokely, marching
down the road, and there are scenes of that.
But then, at night, they would argue.
AMY GOODMAN: With a reporter between them—
TAYLOR BRANCH: With a reporter between them.
AMY GOODMAN: —holding a mic, going back
and forth.
TAYLOR BRANCH: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: And also the inclusion of non-black
activists in the movement.
TAYLOR BRANCH: Yes, but—well, yes, they
wanted—the march was very integrated, the
March Against Fear.
Remember, it’s 220-something miles.
It went on for almost a month.
It’s bigger than the Selma March.
But its significance is that it marks this
big transformation between violence and nonviolence,
or the opening of a debate.
And Stokely would say, “How come we have
to be nonviolent?
How come America admires nonviolence only
in black people, but otherwise they admire
John Wayne, you know?
And why do we have to do that?”
And Dr. King would say, “We don’t.
I’m not telling you you have to do it.
What I’m telling you is that nonviolence
is a leadership doctrine.
It’s ahead of America.
If we become violent, it’s not that we’re
stepping up to be like John Wayne.
It’s that we’re stepping back from nonviolence
to try to move the country toward reconciliation,
toward votes, nonviolence, toward spirituality.”
So they had this big argument about whether
the civil rights movement needed to be nonviolent,
whether it was—whether it was effective,
whether it was principled, and what kind of
leadership strategy it was.
And that debate dominated the last couple
years of Dr. King’s life.
AMY GOODMAN: Taylor Branch, you’re a veteran
civil rights historian.
You won the Pulitzer Prize for Parting the
Waters.
But you, too, were surprised by some of the
footage that you saw in—for King in the
Wilderness.
TAYLOR BRANCH: Yes, I was surprised by—I
wrote, but I didn’t feel as—I wrote in
my book that these thousands of white people
would come out and throw bricks.
And it was women with pocketbooks, and they’d
hit people with pocketbooks, and they’d
yell and scream.
But to write it is different, based on source
material, than to see Nazi signs and people
yelling and screaming in Chicago.
It was a very rough place.
AMY GOODMAN: I mean, the swastikas, the presence
of these swastikas.
TAYLOR BRANCH: Yes.
There were lots of swastikas and lots of young
people involved.
Now, on the other side, Dr. King was trying
to experiment with nonviolence in the North,
and, in many respects, it wassafe.
There are no stories, as there were in Memphis,
of nonviolence breaking down on the movement
side in Chicago.
In fact, a number of gang leaders would come
up to Dr. King’s apartment and argue with
him all night, and a number of gang leaders
were in those marches.
So, he had the Blackstone Rangers and a number
of them in these marches.
In some respects, it was the far reaches of
the laboratory of who could be nonviolent
and whether or not it could work.
But what you get out of the film is you see
the other side of it.
Dr. King said, “We have to show America
that there’s a race problem in the North,
because you’d be surprised how many millions
of people think that there is no more race
problem since we passed the civil rights bill.”
And in that one little task, they succeeded
admirably.
Nobody really argued that there was no racism
in the North, after Chicago.
AMY GOODMAN: Wasn’t he hit by a brick in
Chicago?
TAYLOR BRANCH: He was hit by a brick on that
same march, and once or twice by a rock.
Of course, he was struck many times, stabbed.
You know, violence had always been close to
him his whole life, before Memphis.
That wasn’t new.
But I think, in Chicago, even what Andy said—down
in the South, you would have a couple hundred
Klansmen, you’d be scared.
But in Chicago, there were thousands of people,
and they were enraged, and you could hear
them.
It was an angry crowd.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s talk about Vietnam and
how King ended up making this Riverside address,
speech, “Why I Oppose the War in Vietnam.”
I wanted to turn to a clip of Vince Harding,
before he died.
We had a long conversation with him about
the speech and his conversations with Dr.
King.
The man, Vince Harding, who helped to craft
that speech, this is what he had to say.
DR.
VINCENT HARDING: Martin was, towards the end
of his life, you may remember, by the last
years of his life, he was saying that America
had to deal with three—what he called triple
evils: the evil of racism, the evil of materialism
and the evils of militarism.
And he saw those three very much connected
to each other.
…
In a way, Amy, as long as Martin and I knew
each other, we were talking about the kinds
of things that were involved in that speech.
We were talking about the tremendous damage
that war does to those who participate in
it, to those who are the victims of it, to
those who lose tremendous possibilities in
their own lives because of it.
And we were always talking about what it might
mean to try to find creative, nonviolent alternatives
to the terrible old-fashionedness of war as
a way of solving problems.
And then, when Vietnam began to develop on
all of our screens in the 1960s, we talked
a great deal about our country’s role and
a great deal about the role of those of us
who were believers in the way of nonviolent
struggle for change and what our responsibility
was both as nonviolent believers and as followers
of the teachings and the ways of Jesus the
Christ.
So when Martin was clear with himself that
he had to make a major public address on this
subject, as fully as he could possibly do
it, he was looking for a setting in which
that could be done on the grounds of his religious
stance particularly.
And when clergy and laity against the war
in Vietnam invited him to do that at Riverside
for the occasion of their gathering in April
1967, it was clear to him that that was the
place that he really ought to make the speech
or to take the stand in the most public way
possible.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Vince Harding, a close
ally of Dr. King, who helped to craft that
“Beyond Vietnam” speech, or “Why I Oppose
the War in Vietnam,” the speech that Dr.
King gave at Riverside Church in New York
on April 4th, 1967, a year to the day before
Dr. King was assassinated in Memphis.
Talk about Vince Harding’s role in that
speech, Taylor Branch.
TAYLOR BRANCH: Well, Vince Harding was a Mennonite
student of nonviolence his whole life, who
lived in Atlanta, not far from Dr. King.
And when the speech was—when he undertook
the speech, for reasons that Trey can explain,
it was one of the few that he actually wrote
out.
He had to have it—a condition of doing this
was that they wanted to publicize it and get
his views out.
They wanted a written version of the speech.
Normally—
AMY GOODMAN: That Dr. King wrote out.
TAYLOR BRANCH: Yeah.
And normally, Dr. King kind of improvised
and winged things.
He was like a jazz—but he had to have a
formal speech.
And he called in a number of people, but,
principally, Vince Harding did the first draft
of the speech to try to get it right, one
moment to speak.
And the idea was—the staff didn’t want
him to give the speech, but they said, “If
you’re going to do it, do it in a way that
at least you don’t have—the press will
pay attention to it.
Don’t do it with a lot of 'Hey, hey, LBJ,
how many kids,' you know, placards in the
background.
Don’t do it”—
AMY GOODMAN: “How many kids did you kill
today?”
TAYLOR BRANCH: “'How many kids did you kill?'
Don’t—with anything provocative.
Do it in a nice setting,” turning to Clergy
and Laity Concerned and Dick Fernandez.
And Trey interviewed Dick Fernandez about
how they went in there.
But they were trying to make it as palatable
as possible and get the world one chance to
listen to his comprehensive argument about
the history of Vietnam, about the Vietnamese
people, about how they viewed our claims that
we were fostering this out of concern for
their democratic future.
And he crafted this comprehensive speech,
and nobody listened to it anyway.
They said, “You’re a traitor.
You shouldn’t”—it was one of the big
disappointments in his life.
And—
AMY GOODMAN: And what did King and Vince Harding
say?
TAYLOR BRANCH: Next time he saw him—Vince
told me that the next time Dr. King saw him
in Atlanta, he said, “Vince, you got me
really in a lot of trouble, and I’m going
to blame you and stuff.”
But they survived on gallows humor.
And Dr. King was a champion.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Trey, talk more about the
significance of this speech.
I want to play another clip, this one of Dr.
King himself.
So many of the phrases he used became so important
later.
REV.
MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.: I speak as a child
of God and brother to the suffering poor of
Vietnam.
I speak for those whose land is being laid
waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose
culture is being subverted.
I speak for the poor of America, who are paying
the double price of smashed hopes at home
and death and corruption in Vietnam.
I speak as a citizen of the world, for the
world as it stands aghast at the path we have
taken.
I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders
of our own nation: The great initiative in
this war is ours; the initiative to stop it
must be ours.
As I have walked among the desperate, rejected
and angry young men, I have told them that
Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve
their problems.
I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion
while maintaining my conviction that social
change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent
action.
But they ask, and rightly so, “What about
Vietnam?”
And they ask if our own nation wasn’t using
massive doses of violence to solve its problems,
to bring about the changes it wanted.
Their questions hit home.
And I knew that I could never again raise
my voice against the violence of the oppressed
in the ghettos without having first spoken
clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence
in the world today, my own government.
AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s Dr. King saying
that his country, the United States, was the
greatest purveyor of violence on Earth.
The corporate media, the mainstream media,
went after him, from the Times to Time magazine
to Life magazine.
I have the Life magazine copy still.
And they talked about the fact—they said
that his speech sounded like a script from
Radio Hanoi.
They said he had done a disservice to his
cause, his country and his people.
So, for those young people today who say,
“It was easy for King, because everything
he did, everyone idolized,” he was slammed.
TREY ELLIS: Yeah, it was fascinating for me.
We begin, in the documentary, talking about
when he sort of nudged into the idea of global
politics, talking to Ambassador Goldberg with
Andrew Young.
And anytime he would try to say anything except
for white Southerners shouldn’t segregate,
he was pilloried.
So they really tried their best, as Taylor
said, to say, “How can we make this strong
statement as innocuous, as palatable as possible?”
AMY GOODMAN: And what happens after, a year
to the day before he’s assassinated, that
speech, is what King says.
TREY ELLIS: Yeah, it’s just amazing, the
coincidence that a year to the day after that
speech he’s gunned down in Memphis.
But the backlash against the speech wasn’t
only the media or the white community.
It was also Roy Wilkins and the NAACP.
All the black clergymen were very concerned.
And even inside the SCLC, they were very concerned.
AMY GOODMAN: The Southern Christian Leadership
Conference.
TREY ELLIS: The Southern Christian Leadership
Conference, which he led, they were concerned.
Their money dried up.
He had no friends.
And that’s when Xernona says—Xernona Clayton,
his great adviser, who begins our film, says
he died of a broken heart.
That’s really one of those great reasons,
that everybody seemed to have turned against
him, with his turn against the war.
AMY GOODMAN: Trey, explain this last year
of Dr. King’s life, the Poor People’s
March.
TREY ELLIS: Well, so, after the coming out
against the war in Vietnam—and he’s really
at his lowest point.
Some people might say, and Andy Young would
say, “You deserve it.
If you want to just be—you know, take over
Riverside Church and live in the Upper West
Side of Manhattan, you know, you deserve it.”
Right?
He said, no, he still wanted to fight longer.
And the first interview I did was with Marian
Wright Edelman.
And when she said that—we have her on tape
saying, when she came to—when she visited
the poor in Mississippi with Bobby Kennedy,
and Bobby Kennedy said to her, “Tell King
to bring the poor to Washington,” which
goes to Taylor’s point about having the
public/private, how governance works best,
how King and LBJ could work together—when
she brought that message to King, she goes
into his office, he’s very, very sad.
She tells him this idea from Bobby Kennedy
and her, and he lights up.
And it’s really—I think he saw this as
like this—and he talks about this march
on Washington, this Poor People’s Campaign.
He really envisioned it as bigger than the
“I Have a Dream” speech.
He figured this as like this would be all
Americans—white, black, Hispanic.
All poor people would march on Washington,
and real big transformative change.
And when you see that it’s—the plans for
that march and what could have been in that
march cut short by this assassin’s bullet,
this murderer’s bullet, it’s really quite
heartbreaking.
AMY GOODMAN: Taylor Branch?
TAYLOR BRANCH: One reason that he may have
lit up so much is this idea of racism, poverty
and war, that you mentioned.
He called it the “triple scourge of evil.”
Andy Young mentions it in the film.
That was not a new idea for Dr. King.
It’s the theme of his Nobel Prize lecture,
that they are related—racism, poverty and
war, the violence of the flesh and violence
of the spirit.
So, he had done racism.
He had done war, in Vietnam.
And poverty is equally violent, in his worldview.
So, an opportunity to make an explicit witness
on the third leg of this, what he called the
“ancient triple scourge” of racism, poverty
and war, I think, was something that he knew
he needed to do to make his message complete,
because he had been speaking about this, but
he hadn’t been demonstrating on poverty.
AMY GOODMAN: So, let’s move on to Memphis
and this—not the final moment of Memphis,
but it was in two parts.
And again, we’re talking about enormous
tension within the SCLC and Dr. King’s closest
advisers being concerned about King going
to Memphis.
He had been invited to stand with the sanitation
workers as they tried to unionize.
TAYLOR BRANCH: I will just talk a little bit
about the origins of Memphis.
The staff—he had—it took, as the film
shows, an enormous effort to get the staff
behind the Poor People’s Campaign.
There were a lot of dissension.
Some people said, “If you don’t end the
Vietnam War, it doesn’t matter what we do.”
And other people said, “We still have segregation
in the South and in the North, and we should
be on race relations.”
So he finally gets them to going on the Poor
People’s Campaign and their plans, and then
this incident happened in Memphis.
The strike started because two of the sanitation
workers were crushed to death in the back
of a cylinder garbage truck, when they were
not allowed to seek shelter in rainstorms,
because they were all black, and their rules
did not allow them to seek shelter in any
white neighborhood, because it offended white
people.
And the only place they could find shelter
is in the garbage, with the garbage itself.
And a broom fell and hit a lever and compacted
them, literally crushed them.
That’s the origins of “I Am a Man,”
meaning they picked that slogan because the
whole strike was—it was economic, but it
was also just essential dignity.
They were being crushed like the garbage that
they were picking up, and nobody cared.
AMY GOODMAN: So they carried these signs that
said “I Am a Man.”
TAYLOR BRANCH: They carried these signs.
And the person that was leading the demonstrations,
Jim Lawson, was one of Dr. King’s old mentors
in nonviolence.
And he calls him and says, “Martin, can
you come?”
And so, that’s where the—Trey did most
of the interviews about Memphis, but that’s
where it was.
He said, “I have to go to Memphis.
If we don’t answer this—yes, it’s a
diversion, but it’s from Jim Lawson, and
if these people don’t personify what the
Poor People’s Campaign is going to be about,
nobody does.”
So he once again drags his staff to Memphis
as a diversion from Poor People’s Campaign.
TREY ELLIS: Yeah, I think it’s—
AMY GOODMAN: So, Trey, take it from there.
TREY ELLIS: Well, I think what’s really
amazing about it, we have this—every time
that, you know, when he wanted to go north,
when he wanted to go against the war, he was
getting this pushback from his staff.
And then, now there’s such dissent, that
they actually—he has a little hunger strike,
right?
That like he’s just—it’s the first time
that, Andy Young will say, that he can’t
get through to them.
And he just has to do something really extreme,
so they will—they will listen to him.
To me, an extraordinary moment is like when
he goes to the first Memphis March, and it
goes badly, and some people, for some—it’s
unclear what all their reasons were, but some
people in the back are taking those “I Am
a Man” wooden placards and using them to
break some windows, or they’re agent provocateurs.
Things are happening, and the march is a disaster.
I am most impressed by Dr. King when he’s
on the film and he says, “Yes, it was terrible,
and I should have done a better job organizing
this march.
I shouldn’t have just jumped in, and sight
unseen, into this march.”
You never see—there’s not a single politician
I’ve ever heard in my life who would admit
to that kind of a mistake.
And then, when he comes back, he’s really
redoubling his efforts to come back next time
and make it right.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to the clip of Dr.
King the night before he was killed.
This was April 3rd, 1968.
REV.
MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.: Well, I don’t know
what will happen now.
We’ve got some difficult days ahead.
But it really doesn’t matter with me now,
because I’ve been to the mountaintop.
I don’t mind.
Like anybody, I would like to live a long
life.
Longevity has its place.
But I’m not concerned about that now.
I just want to do God’s will.
And he has allowed me to go up to the mountain.
And I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the
promised land.
I may not get there with you, but I want you
to know tonight that we, as a people, will
get to the promised land!
So I’m happy tonight.
I’m not worried about anything.
I’m not fearing any man!
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming
of the lord!
AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Martin Luther King, speaking
April 3rd, 1968.
He was assassinated less than 24 hours later
in Memphis, 50 years ago today, April 4th,
1968.
Visit democracynow.org to watch our full conversation
with Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Taylor
Branch, Trey Ellis and Peter Kunhardt, director
of the HBO documentary King in the Wilderness.
