Jerome,
I copied the text. The video is a technical challenge I will address later.
“Commentary:
King wanted the poor to reach 'the promised land.' His call remains unanswered
Irving Phillips Jr., the Sun's first black photographer, talks about his experiences as a photographer for the Afro-American during the Baltimore riots following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (Lloyd Fox, Baltimore Sun video)
Paul SteklerWashington Post News Service
Fifty years ago this week,
the Rev.
Martin Luther King Jr. gave one of the best known, yet mostly unheard speeches in American history, his "Mountaintop" speech. He spoke for more than 40 minutes, but only his concluding lines, about looking off into a promised land he might not reach, are widely remembered. For a time, only that passage, appearing to prophesize his death, could be found. But perceived in its original context, his speech is about much more than King's life and fate. It was a call for economic justice in the United States, a call that remains relevant today.
By 1968, King had become someone very different from the man who gave the "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington in 1963. He had begun talking about solutions to poverty and planning for a Poor People's March on Washington. He was called to Memphis to support striking African American sanitation workers making barely a dollar an hour and unable to get recognition for their union. They carried placards with the simple message "I Am a Man."
Local organizers soon lost control of a march, which erupted into violence. The disturbance led to negative media coverage of both the strike and King's planned march in Washington. On the stormy night of April 3, in front of a small crowd at Memphis' cavernous Mason Temple, he spoke.
Years later, I was part of a team working on "Eyes on the Prize," Harry Hampton's civil rights series for PBS. To tell the story of the Memphis strike, we were lucky to find an archive of local news footage, thrown out by the stations and literally rescued from their trash cans by area activists. While there was audio of the entire Mountaintop speech, we were surprised that our initial search turned up just a few minutes of film, mostly the speech's conclusion.
Over the next year, we found more footage, often snippets discovered in mislabeled or unidentified boxes. Ultimately, we included every bit of what we had found for an early rough-cut screening, knowing we'd have to cut it down for our final broadcast hour. Though we eventually used only about two minutes, not a single person at that screening suggested cutting a frame of King's speech. It was that powerful.
Most Americans are familiar with the last 60 seconds of the speech, with its famous declarations "I've been to the mountaintop" and "I've seen the promised land." But the full speech included a call for economic justice in language that portended the man he might have lived to become. King spoke of the arc of history and his happiness at being alive during a human rights revolution to stand up for workers in Memphis. Beyond nonviolent protest, he urged boycotts against businesses that tolerated injustice, and he called those businesses out by name.”
