Broken Dream, The American Experience(PBS)celebrates MLK Day with Citizen King. (REPEAL HOLIDAY?)

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would have turned 75 this Monday if he’d been an ordinary minister without the Gandhi-like calling to integrate racist America via the potent weapon of non-violence. "History has seized me," King explained in the early ’60s, as he became a peripatetic foot soldier in the battle to "break down the walls of segregation" and to bring his "Negro" people "to the promised land." PBS’s The American Experience has chosen to honor the 75th birthday with Citizen King, a 90-minute documentary produced by Orlando Bagwell (Malcolm X: Make It Plain) and Noland Walker (Africans in America: America’s Journey Through Slavery) that will screen in Boston on January 19 and 23 on WGBH 2/Channel 44 (check local listings for Portland airings).

Eyes on the Prize it isn’t. A decision to restrict Citizen King to the civil-rights leader’s final five years, 1963-1968, has created havoc for the filmmakers and confusion for the viewer, especially in the first act of this non-fiction drama. When Citizen King jumps, near the start, into King’s 1963 journey to Birmingham, Alabama, you’re apt to feel you’ve walked into the middle of the program. There’s a sketchy explanation of the issues in Birmingham, no explanation of the city of Birmingham, and no explanation of King’s organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Why does King go to prison in Birmingham? How is he victorious? Without a context, the few sentences given of his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" make no sense. That’s unfortunate: this is one of the most stirring, brilliant pieces of political and spiritual oratory ever.

We’re also plunged into the 1963 March on Washington, where King’s mythic "I Had a Dream" speech is no more illuminated than when we hear bits of it in an overview 1960s documentary. Dr. King is introduced in Washington as "the moral leader of our nation," but you can’t feel that in the haphazard first half-hour of Citizen King. If you admire and love the Nobel Peace Prize winner, it’s from the knowledge you bring to the documentary.

Fortunately, Citizen King slows down, finds its story, and eventually humanizes its main character. That’s at the time, 1965-1968, when King’s victories come hard, if at all, as he moves his integrationist campaign from the South to the West, after the Watts riots, and to Mayor Daley’s Chicago, where he’s met by violent, animalistic white-supremacists during a march on suburban Cicero. For the first time, King is challenged within his own community, by those calling for a more vigilant, fist-in-the-air response to white rule. Citizen King really comes alive with rarely seen footage of a 1966 march through Mississippi in which King is challenged at every turn by an emerging and far more militant leader of color: Stokely Carmichael, future Black Panther. It was during that march that Carmichael first utilized in public the incendiary term "Black Power." King resisted any deviance from turn-the-other-cheek non-violence. Yet by the end of the unhappy Mississippi stay (King: "Mississippi is still evil, the worst state in the union"), he was using Carmichael’s word "black" as often as the "Negro" he had grown up with.

Citizen King is flushed out with present-day, talking-heads interviews with those, African-American and white, who were there in the 1960s. The most glaring missing witnesses: Coretta King and Jesse Jackson. The most useful person doing the remembering: Andrew Young, who was with King in Miscopy, in Washington, on all the marches, and at the fatal end, in Memphis, where they’d come to support a unionizing drive by dirt-poor trash collectors. A weary King managed an eloquent speech: "All labor has dignity. . . . It is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and get starvation wages."

Young gives a vivid description of King’s last hour on earth: they had a boy-like pillow fight in Young’s room, at a Memphis motel. King went outside, toward his room, to dress for dinner. A shot was heard; Young thought it was a firecracker. Dr. Martin Luther King’s legacy? In addition to his monumental civil-rights work, he was an early and courageous opponent of the war in Vietnam. And we can be grateful to the filmmakers of Citizen King for uncovering a King speech that should be brought back as an anti-imperialist anthem in the Bush era: "It seems I can hear God say to America, ‘You are too arrogant, and if you don’t change your ways, I’ll break the backbone of your power.’ "

Many feel this holiday should be repealed? Your thoughts?

On Monday, February 1, 2027, the King tapes will be unsealed.

He was "intimately" (although many say not a member) involved with Communists: New York attorney Stanley David Levison and Hunter Pitts O'Dell aka Jack H. O'Dell; and was said to have cooperated with other Communists such as Carl and Anne Braden. In Sept. 1957, he spoke at a training school in Tennessee with several top Communists accepting funds from identified Communist front groups such as the Southern Conference Education Fund. Former FBI undercover operative Julia Brown -- who reported on Communist Party activities for an entire decade until 1960 -- testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1979 that "the [Communist] cells that I was associated with in Cleveland were continually being asked to raise money for Martin Luther King's activities and to support his movement ... while I was in the Communist Party, as a loyal American Negro, I knew Martin Luther King to be closely connected with the Communist Party ....". Are warnings by President Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy, to be simply dismissed as "political witch-hunting or smear tactics" as many have claimed?

“ I would strengthen a channel that is already in existence, the U.N. ... to bring about universal disarmament, and set up a world police force."-Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

I think Martin Lutehr King, Jr was lucky to die how and when he did.
His reputation rests, and rightly so, on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
After passage of those laws, he found himself a man whose time had passed. He got involved in the War of Poverty and protests against the Vietnam War, neither of which were amenable to the tactics he knew and perfected during the early 1960's.
His involvment in the dispute between the City of Memphis and the garbage workers did little but tarnish his reputation.
And had he not been killed, he would have led that fiasco: the Poor People's March on Washington, an involvement that would have damaged further his reputation.
King's greatest achievement was to convince black people that non-violent, civil disobedience was the only tactic they could use to end legal segregation. And to insist that black people wanted no more than their legal rights as American citizens.
Once King strayed from that message, his influence waned, and he became yesterday's news.
Had he lived, I beleive he would have become an eccentric: a man whose reputation guaranteed a soundbite on the six o'clock news or quotation in the newspaper, but whose real influence didn't go much beyond the end of his own nose.

While Martin Luther King was associating with communists in Cleveland, Calvary Presbyterian Church at 79th & Euclid in the Hough Area was getting 300 4-year scholarships for deserving black students and giving others the skills they needed to gain employment...as well as providing spiritual leadership in the community, In other words, Calvary was doing the things that MLK got the credit for. Result: Liberty Boulevard was re-named MLK Blvd. and no one remembers the achievements of that church in the ghetto.

Bump to read later.

Now that the european-americans who founded this country have been exposed as evil racists maybe we can have more holidays that celebrate diversty.
We should have a national holiday for a famous asian, a famous mexican and especially a holiday for one or more of the indians who evil white people murdered and stole their land.

George Washington was stripped of a holiday in which we could reflect on what a great man he was. Now we share his holiday with the likes of FDR,Carter,Johnson and hillarys husband.
I am afraid that Christmas and Easter will have to go. Afterall how can we seperate religion and gov.org when we as a nation actually have two holidays in honor of God.
They will have to go or we will have to have to change the name and call Christmas gift giving day and we can call Easter egg bunny day or candy for children day.

Yes. Why, come to think of it we use to celebrate a seperate day for ole honest abe and for President Washington.
If memmory serves me correct we were told that Abe felt so bad about slavery he actually had the states go to war against one another. Brother against brother, Father against son and I believe over 500,000 men were killed to "free the slaves" and make sure that fedgov.org became the big player instead of individual states actually having rights of their own.
Can you imagine what this country would have become if states actuallly had the power to say no to fedgov.org.
America was actually the power that stepped up to the plate and said slavery was morally wrong.
After over 5,000 years of slavery being just and moral we ended it by killing one another.That was almost 150 years ago.
Funny how we got rid of slavemasters and now we are indentured servants and we answer to the IRS, FBI,ATF and numerous other masters.
The big lie looks us in the face and laughs because it has us all fooled into thinking it is the truth.
I am a old fart and will probaly not see the worse of it but I feel for our children and what we have left them.

MLK was a man of enormous charisma and courage and certainly a pivotal figure in the civil rights movement. despite that, he ceertainly does not deserve to be the ONLY American with his own holiday named after him. That honor should be reserved for only one person in American history, the greatest of all Americans, George Washington. More so than any other SINGLE figure of the revolution, he was the "indispensable man." Without his courage and integrity, the US would simply not exist.

MLK's birthday was a sop to PC and a reflection of the DemocRAT Congress that voted it. The depth MLK's association with the most anti-freedom ideaology of our time will prove to very embarrassing when it is fully revealed.

For the record, I am a black man who is sick of all the homage to the PC kultursmog that is rampant in this country today.

Many feel this holiday should be repealed? Your thoughts?

After Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years I always reply as I did this year again to my partner when she told me we had a day off on Monday, "A holiday, what holiday?"

Then I go on to say, "How can we have another holiday when we were just off for 2 1/2 weeks?"

Maybe it's just me, but as a businessman I hate the date this holiday falls on. January to me is get your a$$ back to work month so I can't even think of a holiday in this calendar period.

Since Black History month is all of February, then put the holiday in February. Say...February 29th or something...

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.