Morality and Media

I became an attentive study of Dr. King through media.  It began in 1978 when NBC ran a mini-series called "King",  on the 20th anniversary of his assasination.  Years later, I bought the VHS copy of the series.  That year ,  my senior year at Murray State,  I wrote my "Law and Society" paper on "Civil Disobedience and Martin Luther King, Jr.".  A couple years later,  at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary,  I wrote my Church History Paper on "The Southern Baptist Response to the Life and Death of Martin Luther King",  comparing and contrasting the articles in mostly two state papers,  Alabama and Virginia,  conservative and more liberal, respectively.  

Although the actor Paul Winfield's voice  SOUNDS nothing like Martin Luther King,  he gave an impassioned and inspiring performance,  and I was moved by such speeches that contained words like "...If we are wrong,  then the Supreme Court of the United States is worong....If we are wrong,  then the Constiution is wrong.....If we are wrong, then God almighty is wrong"  and "How long?  Not long!  Because no lie can live forever.  How long? Because you reap what you sow!",  and of course "I have a dream".  I don't know that I had ever really listened to the content of those speeches until I watched this story.   I later went to see the movie "Gandhi" because of the portrayal of King going to India and coming back to tell his story about how he was inspired by how "Mahatma Gandhi challenged the British Empire without a sword and won" and how Gandhi believed that unmerited suffering was redemptive.

It is interesting that I "discovered" King via television.  He had said that the cameras were going to "bring the country face to face with itself",  which it did as Americans watched Bull Connor turn the hoses on the protestors,  and showed George Wallace standing in the doorway of the University of Alabama vowing that "No niggra will ever enroll here".  During the same year I saw the King series,  I also,  just months earlier,  saw "Roots" and maybe a year later,  "The Autiobiography of Miss Jane Pittman".  I hope to get that Roots DVD someday.  

The fact that electronic media were instrumental in the spread of the Civil Rights movement is siginificant as we are again being transformed again by the adddition of the Internet and The Web to our communication technologies.

© Copyright 2003 Dale Lature. Last update: 9/23/2003; 3:39:17 PM.