Boldt Words & Images: Martin Luther King Jr. & Me

By Bob Boldt

[I covered Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as an electronic journalist for WFLD-TV in Chicago. Behind the scenes, I saw many things that most people weren’t aware of. Dr. King is arguably the greatest man of peace of this or any other age; his inspiration strongly influenced my radicalization and social and political activism.
    I will deliver the reflections below at a meeting later this month of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Jefferson City, Missouri, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the King of Love’s killing (on April 4, 1968).]

Mayor Richard J. Daily & MLK Jr.

I do not attend celebrations of Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy. Seeing platitudes of racial understanding spouted by the very officials who would gladly rush forth to drive in the first nail in his re-crucifixion is too much for even the strongest stomach to tolerate. The King whom they have sanitized for our protection is not the man I remember or wish to celebrate.
    I had the exceptional privilege to cover Martin Luther King Jr. as an electronic journalist during the larger part of 1966 when he was in Chicago leading and organizing the Poor People’s Campaign for Human Rights. I was in close contact with Dr. King in my coverage of his activities.
    The late 1960s were fraught. Fraught is the right word. The society was in nearly as much chaos as today. The difference is, unlike the anesthetized present, back then the issues were clearer. We were not distracted by as much media duplicity and false news. We were intensely aware of the social and political dissonance that stood out in high relief.

In Mayor Daley's office
(that's me behind Daley, with the camera)

The black movement was hardly united. The spectrum of competing strategies, analyses, and perceptions ranged from the Black Panthers at one end to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) at the other. I witnessed King beset on all sides as activists attempted to pull him in multiple directions. He was struggling against Mayor Richard J. Daley and his patronage machine, which kept “our Negroes” in comfortable cages. The black pro-Mayor Daley voices were represented by Congressional Representative William L. Dawson, “the black overlord of the South Side.” The Southern Christian Leadership Conference was engaged in a power struggle with the Black Panthers. The Nation of Islam, or Black Muslims, preached isolation, while conservative Northern blacks preached gradualism. Even the NAACP viewed King’s demands for fair housing and other playing-field levelers for poor black folks as threatening the sometimes tenuous establishment they had “accommodated” for themselves.

President Johnson with Mayor Daley

    Not least of all was incipient Northern racism. In the Southern campaigns, a few hundred and often only a dozen or so Ku Klux Klan and white supremacists came to counter-protest. In the open housing march through Cicero, Illinois, where King was hit with a rock, thousands would come. It was a racism that was present but denied by the conservative and midstream Democrats of the time. It didn’t take King’s dealing with Mayor Daley very long before I heard him say that he would rather deal with Southerner Bull Connor than with Mayor Daley. No love was lost on Daley’s part either. Boy, could I tell you stories….

Pointing to the location where
it was believed the shots were fired

Nineteen sixty-eight was a watershed year for me personally as well as for the nation. Literally dozens of earth-shattering events occurred every week. We seemed to be reeling from one horrific event or revelation to the next. It would take me my allotted six minutes to even list them all. Most notable for my emerging consciousness were the assassination of Dr. King in Memphis (on April 4) and the Chicago Democratic Convention in August.

MLK Jr. with LBJ in the Oval Office

    What then have I derived from my association with Dr. King and my experiences of being chased out of Lincoln Park by Chicago’s finest during those fateful times during the Democratic Convention? At the time of King’s assassination in Memphis, the tension between President Johnson and Dr. King over the Vietnam War had become outright hostility. Later it was determined in a law court that the federal government had a more active responsibility in the assassination. Like Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray was nothing more than a patsy. Most Americans no longer believe that Lee Harvey Oswald shot President Kennedy, but most erroneously believe that James Earl Ray shot King.

    At the time of his execution Dr. King’s insistence on equating the triple pestilences of racism, poverty, and war had arguably made him the most hated man in America. Even the blacks in his own movement opposed his “unpatriotic” pronouncements. Black leadership did not want to hear about a critique of the president who signed the Voting Rights Act. Liberals did not want to be thought of as supporting a genocidal war in Vietnam, and no one in the North wanted to think of themselves as more racist than the South.
    Since those days, the United States has done its damnedest to refute and deny King’s axiom that “the arc of history bends toward justice.” As we continue our inexorable slide toward oligarchy and fascism, I will always look back on those days being in the physical presence of a remarkable man of peace. I will always remember King as the greatest redeemer of our age.
    In his life, and more importantly in his execution, Dr. Martin Luther King taught me that the only freedom lies in resistance to illegitimate authority, and redemption is possible only through revolt. I do not resist and do not work to destroy fascism in the country King called “the greatest purveyor of violence” because I think I will win, but because it is fascism.

Chris Hedges

Albert Camus

Chris Hedges best embodies the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr. in today’s world. Speaking of another of my heroes, Albert Camus, Hedges said:

Camus argued that we are separated from each other. Our lives are meaningless. We cannot influence fate. We will all die and our individual being will be obliterated. And yet Camus wrote that “one of the only coherent philosophical positions is revolt. It is a constant confrontation between man and his obscurity. It is not aspiration, for it is devoid of hope. That revolt is the certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation that ought to accompany it.”

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I highly recommend Paul Street’s January 19 essay in CounterPunch, “Dr. King’s Long Assassination.” Its opening paragraphs:

As the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s violent death (on April 4, 1968) grows closer, you can expect to hear more and more in U.S. corporate media about the real and alleged details of his immediate physical assassination (or perhaps execution). You will not be told about King’s subsequent and ongoing moral, intellectual, and ideological assassination.
    I am referring to the conventional, neo-McCarthyite, and whitewashed narrative of King that is purveyed across the nation every year, especially during and around the national holiday that bears his name. This domesticated, bourgeois airbrushing portrays King as a mild liberal reformist who wanted little more than a few basic civil rights adjustments in a supposedly good and decent American System – a loyal supplicant who was grateful to the nation’s leaders for finally making noble alterations. This year was no exception.
    The official commemorations never say anything about the Dr. King who studied Marx sympathetically at a young age and who said in his last years that “if we are to achieve real equality, the United States will have to adopt a modified form of socialism.” They delete the King who wrote that “the real issue to be faced” beyond “superficial” matters was the need for a radical social revolution.

Copyright © 2018 by Bob Boldt