You should do yourself a favor and watch (courtesy of C-Span) this amazing Meet the Press interview with the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., which occurred almost exactly 50 years ago.
The interview, which took place three days after the conclusion of the Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march, captures the fragmented opinions at the time. Today the march is viewed by nearly everyone as a great success and a profoundly important moral achievement–but at the time, it was a good deal more controversial, and not only in the South.
NBC’s Lawrence Spivak begins the show by quoting former President Harry Truman, who referred to the Selma-to-Mongomery march as “silly” and flatly stated that it “can’t accomplish a darn thing except to attract attention.” There were questions from panelists about whether (among other things) the $300,000 expenditure for federal troops was too much to spend given what the march accomplished. And you’ll hear a reference to a column by Evans and Novak charging significant Communist infiltration of the civil-rights movement.
The power of watching events as they unfolded at the time is that they capture what was really going on and how our interpretation of things now was hardly the widespread interpretation of how things were then.
But the best part of this interview is Dr. King, who was essentially conducting a moral seminar on just and unjust laws. Dr. King argued that we have a moral obligation to obey just laws and a moral obligation to disobey unjust laws (like segregation). “Non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good,” he said. But Dr. King went out of his way to stress the proper way to conduct civil disobedience: openly, cheerfully, lovingly, civilly, and with a willingness to accept the penalties for breaking the law.
What comes through most of all is the incandescent moral power of King; his sophisticated understanding of moral philosophy; and his ability to make his case in ways that are at once accessible and elevated. “A just law squares with the moral law,” he said. And King spent much of his life articulating what the moral law was and how it applied to circumstances of his time.
If you like history and the drama of the American story, this is an interview for you. And I’m guessing that it will remind you, as it reminded me, how fortunate the United States was to have a man of Martin Luther King Jr.’s gifts and greatness when they were most needed.
The Reverend King belongs in the American pantheon, and this interview from a half-century ago demonstrates why.
