The Media Strategy of Martin Luther King, Jr. January 1, 1967, to April 4, 1968 Stephen Gordon

182 Pages·2012·9.95 MB·English

by  Stephen Smith

To End War and Poverty: The Media Strategy of Martin Luther King, Jr.
January 1, 1967, to April 4, 1968

Stephen Gordon Foster Smith

A Thesis
in
The Department of Communications

Presented in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements
for the Degree of Master of Media Studies (Communications)
at
Concordia University
Montreal, Quebec, Canada

August 2012

© Stephen Gordon Foster Smith, 2012
CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY
School of Graduate Studies

This is to certify that the thesis prepared

By: Stephen Gordon Foster Smith

Entitled: To End War and Poverty: The Media Strategy of Martin Luther King, Jr.,
January 1, 1967, to April 4, 1968

And submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts (Media Studies)

complies with the regulations of the University and meets the accepted standards with respect
to originality and quality.

Signed by the final Examining Committee:

_____Owen Chapman_________________ Chair

_____Monika Gagnon ________________ Examiner

_____Graham Carr ___________________ Examiner

_____Leslie Shade ___________________ Supervisor

Approved by: ___________________________________
Chair of Department or Graduate Program Director

___________ 2012 ___________________________________
Dean of Faculty
ABSTRACT

To End War and Poverty: The Media Strategy of Martin Luther King, Jr.
January 1, 1967, to April 4, 1968

Stephen Gordon Foster Smith

Through 1967 until his assassination on April 4, 1968, American civil rights leader
Martin Luther King, Jr. focused his internationally-recognized authority as a moral and
religious leader against America's war in Vietnam and the values that he saw perpetuating
the poverty of an estimated 40-million Americans. King’s so-called “new radicalism”
presented the difficult challenge of trying to win favourable news coverage for views that
challenged those of the news media and mainstream America. Through the transcripts of
an FBI wiretap on the home phone of King's most trusted strategist, Stanley D. Levison,
and other archival documents, this thesis seeks a better understanding of the media
strategy that went into advancing King's antiwar views and his efforts to rid American
society of poverty. Positioning himself between go-slow moderates and go-for-broke
radicals, King promoted a compelling “militant middle” that wedded radical idealism and
pragmatic realism into a dramatic message that the news media could not ignore. Such a
strategy was not without its risks and left King facing media coverage that was often
critical of his refusal to drop his opposition to the war and adopt a more moderate
approach in his fight against poverty. Yet media coverage also provided a crucial forum
for his “new radicalism” that King deliberately sought out and used to warn America that
its tolerance of war, racism and poverty was leading to social catastrophe and the nation’s
imminent “spiritual death.”
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Acknowledgements

This thesis owes a debt of gratitude to a number of people whose support along the way
has been invaluable, in particular my parents, M.M. (Bud) and Sheila Smith, Karina
Marliss, and Leslie Regan Shade. I would also like to acknowledge the generous
assistance of David J. Garrow, for his insight on Martin Luther King, Jr. and his prompt
and thorough replies to my many emails along the way, and Adam Fairclough, for taking
the time to speak with me at the start of this study and alerting me to the existence of the
FBI transcripts, without which this study would not have been possible.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................... 1
“A great media problem” ......................................................................................................... 4
Research Questions ................................................................................................................. 7
Historical context .................................................................................................................... 8
Vietnam ............................................................................................................................ 8
The Poor People’s Campaign........................................................................................... 10
Ghetto Uprisings ............................................................................................................. 11
Black Power.................................................................................................................... 12
White backlash................................................................................................................ 15
Methodology ......................................................................................................................... 17
FBI wiretap transcripts .......................................................................................................... 18
A word on news sources ........................................................................................................ 19
Media strategy: Vietnam........................................................................................................ 20
Media Strategy and the Poor People’s Campaign ................................................................... 22

CHAPTER I: Ain’t gonna study war no more ....................................................................... 27
Riverside............................................................................................................................... 29
The New York Times .............................................................................................................. 32
“A frustrating and very lonesome road” ................................................................................. 36
Media Strategy ...................................................................................................................... 40
Establish whom you are with ................................................................................................. 40
Retain your support, move them along .................................................................................. 45
King versus the black Establishment ............................................................................... 48
The Spring Mobilization ................................................................................................. 54
Assert the militant middle ..................................................................................................... 58
The militant middle and the news media .......................................................................... 60
The radical frame ............................................................................................................ 62

CHAPTER II: The Poor People’s Campaign ......................................................................... 70
A new challenge: Dramatizing poverty .................................................................................. 71
A Revolution of Values.......................................................................................................... 73
The Do-Nothing Congress ..................................................................................................... 75
The New York Times .............................................................................................................. 80
Civil disobedience and media Strategy .................................................................................. 82
Disruptive acts, constructive goals ......................................................................................... 86
A Poor People's Campaign .............................................................................................. 90
Countering the radical frame ........................................................................................... 92
To heal a sick nation .............................................................................................................. 96
A “sick" Congress ........................................................................................................... 97
The approaching flashpoint ............................................................................................. 98
The Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders .............................. 99
Convincing the middle-class ......................................................................................... 102
Assert King’s Leadership .................................................................................................... 105
Showdown for Nonviolence .......................................................................................... 105
Fight for recognition ..................................................................................................... 107
Neutralize Black Power/Black Nationalists.................................................................... 109
Stokely Carmichael ....................................................................................................... 113
A trouble-obsessed news media ..................................................................................... 115
Memphis ............................................................................................................................. 117
The "logic of the press" ................................................................................................. 120
Fightback ...................................................................................................................... 123

CHAPTER III: Discussions and Conclusions...................................................................... 127
The struggle for “meaning” ................................................................................................. 127
The news media and protest ................................................................................................ 129
Media standing.................................................................................................................... 132
Hegemonic crisis = opportunity ........................................................................................... 134
Discussion: Martin Luther King, Jr. versus the media? ......................................................... 135
The “vortex of conflicting forces” ................................................................................. 136
Mainstreaming King’s “new radicalism” ....................................................................... 139
The news media and King’s “new radicalism” ............................................................... 141

APPENDIX A : Notes on methodology ................................................................................. 150
APPENDIX B: FBI transcripts and newspaper clippings .................................................. 153
REFERENCES………………………………..………………………………………....................................169
INTRODUCTION

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. we see represented in today’s mainstream news
media is not the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. whom Americans were familiar with in
1967 and the first four months of 1968. King’s modern media representation is limited to
his campaigns in the Southern United States between 1955 and 1965 and emphasizes his
belief in the possibility of racial reconciliation and harmony in American society, a belief
immortalized in his famous “I have a dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial in
Washington on August 28, 1963. Deleted from the frame are the growing doubts about
his country that characterized the following four and a half years of King’s short 39-year
life. Notably absent is his conviction that a “radical reordering of national priorities”
(King, 1968, p.100) was needed to cure the racism, extreme materialism and militarism
that he believed were leading America toward her “spiritual death” (219). Forty-four
years after he was silenced by a sniper’s bullet on April 4, 1968, America’s news media
continue to direct our popular memory of Martin Luther King, Jr. away from the
inconvenient prophecies of his last years.
In his essential profile on the civil rights leader in the August 1967 issue of
Harper’s magazine, journalist David Halberstam described this evolution as King’s “new
radicalism” (Halberstam, 1967, in Reporting Civil Rights, 2003, p.564). As Halberstam
observed, radical thought was nothing new for King, only that “in the decade of 1956 to
1966 he was the radical America felt comfortable to have spawned” (563). King’s use of
nonviolent direct action in the Southern states, with its tactical emphasis on disobeying
laws that supported racial segregation, was accepted by America’s white majority because
of his skill for swaddling civil disobedience in Christian principles and the patriotic
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language of the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. While King’s
tactics remained largely unchanged in 1967, what was new and discomfiting was their
targets – the war in Vietnam and America’s economic class structure – and the climate of
heightened racial tensions in cities across America that lent his “new radicalism” a
threatening edge. As Halberstam wrote of the spring of 1967, “it was a time when the
Negro seemed more than ever rebellious and disenchanted with the white; and the white
middle class – decent, upright – seemed near saturation with the Negro’s new rebellion.
The Negro cities seemed nearer to riots than ever; the white, seeing the riots on TV,
wanted to move further away from the Negro than ever before. A terrible cycle was
developing” (565).
Given such circumstances, the news media more than ever needed King as the
symbol of “respectability and moderation” that over the years he had come to represent in
their pages and broadcasts, and thus to millions across America (August Meier, 1965, in
Reporting Civil Rights, 2003, p. 456). More importantly, white America and the news
organizations that represented it needed King to be what historian August Meier
described as their “good friend” (ibid) who put them at ease when it seemed black
dissatisfaction with the status quo was threatening to develop into open hostility towards
them. By 1967, however, King could no longer provide the kind of mellifluous hope that
the news media wanted and expected of him. Though he continued to preach
nonviolence, King’s preoccupation from 1965 onwards with the moral ramifications of
America’s war in Vietnam and the economic class structure that kept millions of its black
citizens in poverty changed his outlook on his country and consequently the tone with
which he addressed its white majority. As David Halberstam observed, King had decided
2
to work and speak for the ghettos, but the voice of the ghettos was “harsh and alienated.
If King is to speak for them truly, then his voice must reflect theirs, it too must be
alienated, and it is likely to be increasingly at odds with the rest of American society”
(578). A press statement composed for King by his principal advisor and speechwriter,
Stanley D. Levison, in response to an uprising in Detroit’s black community in July 1967
echoed Halberstam’s observation: “I regret that my expression may be sharp but I believe
literally that the life of our nation is at stake here at home. Measures to preserve it need to
be boldly and swiftly applied before the process of social disintegration engulfs the whole
of society” (FBI, 7/24/67, 7/0442).1
King’s increasingly discordant views, however, did not result in a consequent decline
in media interest in what he had to say. If anything, his outspoken opinions drew more
media coverage than ever before precisely because of his “new radicalism.” While
journalists like David Halberstam lent King’s views increasing weight, others began to
cover him with heightened skepticism if not hostility. In a private conversation with King
recorded by a Federal Bureau of Investigation wiretap, Stanley Levison offered one
explanation for the heightened media interest attending to his views:
You’re not just the man who’s saying you must love them – they’re getting
the other part of the message, [that] there are certain sacrifices involved...
You’re going through something of a metamorphosis. They can’t quite
place you as conveniently as they used to be able to. And I think you’ll be
getting a lot of attention, not all of it necessarily favorable. You’ll
command attention, because they know where to put most of the [civil
rights] leadership... But I think they don’t know quite where to put you.
And until they do, they’ve got to keep watching you (FBI, 3/25/67,6/0864).

1 The referencing system that I employ for FBI transcripts in this study represents the date (M/D/Y) of
the original recording followed by the microfilm reel number and the first frame of the date in question
(ie 7/0442 is frame 0442 of Reel 7).
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“A great media problem”
This thesis examines Martin Luther King, Jr.’s strategic response to news coverage of his
“new radicalism” and in particular his positions on Vietnam and economic justice for
America’s poor in the last 16 months of his life, from January 1967 to his assassination
on April 4, 1968. According to historian Adam Fairclough, King’s opposition to the war
and his shift toward more radical social and economic policies during this period
presented a “great media problem” for him and his circle of advisors, known as the
Research Committee (Fairclough, interview with the author, recorded March 14, 2011).
King and the committee members were very aware of the fact that King could only go so
far to the left of the mainstream – “Going too far to the left in America gets you labeled
as a radical or a Communist or a Socialist,” Fairclough said (ibid). Accordingly, Stanley
Levison and King’s other key advisers worked more closely with him than ever during
this period to develop and frame his positions in ways that would protect him from
allegations of extremism and Communist influence. Levison, who was older than King
and whose past affiliations with the American Communist Party had led to a subpoenaed
appearance before the anti-Communist House Un-American Activities Committee
(HUAC), was especially determined to protect King from being smeared and “consigned
to oblivion” like so many other critics of America’s Cold War Establishment (ibid).
Levison outlined his understanding of America’s distaste for extremism in an
April 1965 letter to King, who sought Levison's views on the strong media backlash that
had recently greeted his proposal for a nationwide economic boycott of products made in
Alabama. Leading the criticism was an editorial in the New York Times that called King’s
proposal “wrong in principle” and contrary to the “orderly, lawful methods” that would
best serve his stated goals of ending police brutality against civil rights workers in
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