Tavis Smiley’s program MLK: A Call to Conscience – Part 1 was chosen for this paper because it covers a part of Martin Luther King’s career which adds another dimension to his historical persona as the leader of the modern day Civil Rights Movement. The central message of Smiley’s program is that by coming out against the war in Vietnam, Dr. King surprised, and to certain extent alienated, his colleagues in the Civil Rights Movement. This point was made through Smiley’s narrations and interviews with surviving members of the Civil Rights Movement, as well as contemporary leaders such as Cornell West.
One weakness of the film is that the filmmakers only had a few minutes of film of the speech and had to rely primarily on an audio recording of the speech. This was augmented visually by beautiful shots of the interior of the Riverside Church, where the speech was made on April 4, 1967, and by floating titles containing key words and phrases from the speech. This film is significant because it reveals that Dr. King was multi-dimensional in his drive for social justice and that he was driven by his “conscience.” For Dr. King, the same values of social justice and equality, which he pursued in the Civil Rights Movement and the war against poverty, applied to the Vietnam War. Specifically, he believed that the U.S. government’s use of violence in Vietnam to fight communism was immoral and further, that the war had an unequal and unjust impact on the poor and particularly young black men.
There were repeated references to the U.S. wars of the twenty-first century, indicating that the filmmakers were asking the viewer to apply Dr. King’s attitudes toward Vietnam to today’s conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. In other words, Dr. King’s message resonates today.
Since this was “Part 1” of a series, certain questions were left unanswered. Most importantly is what impact did Dr. King’s speech have on the anti-war movement and did it diminish his ability to achieve successes in his fight for domestic social justice? This film, however, did not change this writer’s understanding of Dr. King. As was pointed out in the film, he was a fervent believer in non-violence. He achieved enormous change through non-violence in the Civil Rights Movement. It follows quite logically that his conviction toward non-violence would also apply to Vietnam.
The most important lesson learned from this film is that, in the last year of his life, Dr. King, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, broadened his movement to oppose the war in Vietnam. In this sense, Dr. King, in this film, demonstrates that the great cause of justice for African Americans is not limited to ending segregation and gaining voting rights, but is part of the fabric of American history in a larger sense: an ongoing commitment to a moral and just foreign policy, as well as domestic.
Howard, Gerald, ed. The Sixties: Art, Politics, and Media of Our Most Explosive Decade. New
York: Paragon, 1991. Print.
Oates, Stephen B. Let The Trumpet Sound: The Life of Martin Luther King, Jr. New York:
Penguin. 1982.
Smiley, Tavis. MLK: A Call to Conscience – Part 1. pbs.org. Video. 25 August 2011. Web.
