I’m really sorry that I missed this, because Martin Luther King Jr. is one of a small handful of heroes I have. I hope I get to catch it on a rerun:

AMY GOODMAN: An excerpt of Tavis Smiley’s PBS film “Beyond Vietnam” [MLK: A Call to Conscience] that will air on Wednesday night.

Tavis Smiley, joining us now from Burbank, California, welcome to Democracy Now! This is extremely powerful and relevant, as President Obama just made this surprise trip to Afghanistan. You go back to a time when another African American leader, Dr. Martin Luther King, broke ranks not only with the president that he had worked with on civil rights and voting rights, but with many in his own circles, to speak out against the war in Vietnam.

TAVIS SMILEY: Yeah, Amy, first of all, always an honor to be on your program.

The timing of this special, airing on Wednesday night, to your point, could not be more propitious, given that the President has just made this surprise visit to Afghanistan. Of course, we never know these things when we schedule these kinds of specials, what the news will bring us, but the timing, again, couldn’t be any better.

But this speech, “Beyond Vietnam: Breaking the Silence,” is given by Dr. King on April 4, 1967, literally one year to the day later he’s assassinated in Memphis, April 4, 1968. But to your point, it is the speech that caused him the greatest deal of controversy and consternation, quite frankly. Most Americans, I think, know the “I Have a Dream” speech. Some Americans, Amy, know the “Mountaintop” speech given the night before he was assassinated in Memphis. But most Americans do not know this “Beyond Vietnam” speech, which got King, again, in a world of trouble. He comes out very clearly and talks about three things that are causing him consternation: militarism, racism and poverty. And he links all three of those things in this “Beyond Vietnam” speech.

And the speech is so—it so rankles and angers the country that 168 major newspapers the next day—168 the following day—all did editorials denouncing him. The New York Times, the liberal New York Times, called the speech “wasteful” and “self-defeating.” The Washington Post goes on to aver that he has done himself, his country and the world, quite frankly, a disservice, and he would never be respected again—paraphrasing it, but that’s what the Washington Post says the next day. But in most major newspapers he was denounced the next day, because the night before, in the speech, he had referred to the US, Amy, as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”

And for saying that, he gets demonized by most major newspapers; he gets disinvited, as you said earlier, by LBJ to the White House; indeed, black leaders—Roy Wilkins, the head of the NAACP, Whitney Young, the head of the Urban League—black leaders turned against him. And finally, over the next year of his life before he’s killed in Memphis, the last poll taken about his popularity, a Harris poll, Amy, found that almost three-quarters of the American people had turned against King. Fifty-five percent of his own people, black folk, had turned against King. The last years of his life were very, very lonely, in part because he was so adamant about the war in Vietnam.

AMY GOODMAN: Tavis, I want to go to that very place in Dr. Martin Luther King’s speech that he gave at Riverside Church, April 4th, 1967.

REV. DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.: 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 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: Yes, that was Dr. King, April 4th, 1967. A year later to the day, he would be assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. Time Magazine called the speech “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi.” But he wouldn’t stop, Tavis Smiley.

TAVIS SMILEY: Yeah, he would not stop. And what’s fascinating, Amy—and I think this will come through Wednesday night, when the special airs on PBS—what will come through is that if you replace the words “Iraq” for “Vietnam,” “Afghanistan” for “Vietnam,” “Pakistan” for “Vietnam,” this speech is so relevant today.

There’s a powerful part of the special. We talk to so many of King’s closest aides, advisers, scholars across the country who are part of this conversation. You played the piece from Clayborne Carson a moment ago who’s in charge of the King papers. And so many in King’s circle, so many of King’s devotees were disappointed when President Obama—himself, of course, a Nobel Peace Prize recipient. So you have King, the youngest ever, then and now, to receive the Peace Prize, of black men from the United States, you have Barack Obama, a young African American man, President of the United States, both now with these Nobel Peace Prizes.

And in President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize speech, we wrestle with a particular part of that text that nobody in the mainstream media seems to have wrestled with, and that is the part in the speech—King and Obama, of course, already locked together in history, I think, as the two most iconic African Americans now, during the campaign black folk everywhere wearing T-shirts with King and Obama’s face on the T-shirt. So they’re already linked in history. But then Obama steps to the podium in Oslo and starts out with a particular part of his speech where he’s giving Dr. King his just respect. It’s impossible for, again, this second, this black man, Obama—the other black man, of course, to receive the prize, Ralph Bunche—but impossible for President Obama to give this speech, I think, in Oslo without referencing Dr. King. So he talks about King and gives him the requisite respect he deserves.

But then, in that speech, Amy, he makes a turn and talks about the fact—and I’m paraphrasing here—that he can’t be guided by King’s notion of nonviolence in today’s world. And he suggests he couldn’t do that because King didn’t know al-Qaeda. And that really—and he goes deeper than that, but he really starts to rankle some who have been—you know, who worked with and advised Dr. King. Harry Belafonte and others talk in this special about how that really pricked them, and some of them felt insulted by that, as if Dr. King did not know violence in his lifetime and as if he could not intellectually wrestle with the violence, the terrorism that we’re up against today, but most importantly, the notion that nonviolence in today’s world is irrelevant and could not make a difference. So it’s a fascinating conversation about the parallels, and yet, at the same time, the tension, on the issue of war and peace between King and Obama.
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