“My work is simply an attempt to tell America that it has a wonderful ideal and that it should be fulfilled,” said Martin Luther King Jr. in 1961 in an exclusive interview with the BBC. What is the truth behind the myth surrounding the civil rights leader?
“It is never easy to accept the role of symbolism without going through constant moments of self-examination,” the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. told the BBC’s Face to Face program in 1961.
The BBC interview took place between two turning points in the civil rights movement. It was filmed six years after King led a 381-day boycott of Montgomery buses following Rosa Parks’ refusal to give up her bus seat to a white man, and two years before he gave his “I have a dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington. Interview of John Freeman explores the early experiences that helped shape King’s political and ethical outlook.
Martin Luther King Jr is known as the face of the civil rights fight in the mid-20th century, a Nobel Peace Prize winner and the only non-president whose birthday is celebrated as an American holiday. Born in deeply segregated Atlanta, Georgia on January 15th, 1929, he was originally named Michael after his father, the Rev Michael King, who was senior pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. However, on a trip to Germany, King Sr. was inspired to change his and his son’s name to Martin, after the leader of the Protestant Reformation.
MLK’s legacy plays a major role in the messy project of the United States (U.S.). Even his most famous speech is quintessentially American: inspired by the Bible, the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution and Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the Gettysburg Address.
“My work is just an attempt to tell America that it has a wonderful ideal and that it should live up to it,” said Martin Luther King in an interview with the BBC. “This problem can be solved in the U.S. if enough people dedicate themselves to it; if they dedicate their lives to breaking down all the barriers that separate people based on race or color,” he said.
Yet it seemed so far away. “The vast majority of black Americans still face the problems of economic insecurity and social isolation,” King told the BBC in 1961.
For those who knew and studied King, the “long and bitter—but beautiful—struggle for a new world” is still worth fighting. “I’m his daughter, and I do a lot of self-examination in light of the things he says,” says Bernice. “How do we overcome the complexity of these issues? How do we create a coexistence that doesn’t suppress, silence, or sideline?”
Photo: Britannica Encyclopaedia
