He belabored the point, suggesting unambiguously that it was time to redistribute land and wealth.
King went on to emphasize the distinction between subsidized white farmers and former slaves, between the thieves in industry and thieves of culture. 1968 was a year of breaking out of trances and they were not immune to breakthrough as they had not been immune to the entrancing momentum of “the movement,” which, by now, they both realized was headed toward a dead end unless they began to name the new tangible evils and dispel them.
King and Baldwin must have been keenly aware of how their impromptu ensemble destabilized their reputations. King was not in Los Angeles to deliver more flowers to the grave of that brotherly love which he had openly mourned and prayed over for decades in his calls for solidarity and unconditional peace he seemed intent on exposing the necrotic contents of that crypt without remorse. The almost outrageous risk he was taking in moving from the expected exhortations for boycotts and passive resistance to a deeper and more cohesive systemic critique was undercut by a vocal style markedly more doctrinaire than his preaching and performative speeches.
That day in Beverly Hills, King made the link between poverty in the United States and the war in Vietnam, synthesizing both circumstances into one call for spiritual reckoning and reconciliation, and making him a clear and viciously targeted enemy of the state. He delivered oratory so technical, detached and devoid of demagogy and optimism, that maybe he was using Los Angeles for what it was, exploiting its optics to at last say the things he knew would bait his enemies into revealing their desperately malicious intentions. But on the occasion of this speech, he seemed to forget where he was, breaking with the agendas of set and setting, refusing to be flattered by celebrity accompanists, no glints of admiration or joy in his cadence. Like the films rushing toward their death scenes and catastrophes, he was that kind of star then, the leading man who leads by placing himself in danger so others can indulge the mundane carefree. Army killed 500 Vietnamese villagers and proceeded to cover it up for years before reporting on it - King was in a purgatory between drama and dream, between Los Angeles and Memphis, between serenity and brutality. On that Saturday in 1968 - a date that coincided with the My Lai Massacre wherein members of the U.S. In the 1950s, he quickly developed a reputation for being a gun-toting, switchblade-carrying man on one hand and an impossibly tender soul who could write love songs with the facility of angels on the other. Image Piecing together the story of my father, the Black cowboy-musician Jimmy Holiday ” He assumed a tone of detached but prophetic ennui for the next 40 minutes. King took the microphone, the final runner in a doomed relay - “There comes a time when silence is betrayal. This was an era during which clichés did not double as exaggerations the introduction was a warning and a goodbye. Baldwin closed with a clichéd but very literal innuendo concerning the stakes of it all: “It’s a matter of life or death.” What Baldwin didn’t explain was how that decency and resilience had by then become its own violence, a righteous self-sabotage both necessary and agonizing in King’s estimation. He pointed out that Martin had spent those years in and out of jail, and that in many ways he was captive still, or stilted by his ability to remain decent in the face of oppression. Instead, Jimmy offered a matter-of-fact recapitulation of the civil rights struggle from 1954 to 1968 and named their current moment in 1968 “a culmination of that cavalcade of events,” from the Bus Boycott to desegregation of schools. There were none of his signature epiphanies.
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He seemed full of dislocated vitriol and his words landed tonally somewhere between rambling and total restraint. Baldwin spoke after Brando, extemporaneously and in parables about Black Sambo and Detroit’s relationship to Saigon and integration in the South. James Baldwin and Marlon Brando introduced him. On March 16, 1968, Martin Luther King spoke at a benefit for Vietnam, held in Beverly Hills. (neonhoney / Los Angeles Times photos: Michael Ochs Archives, Robert Elfstrom/Villon Films, Anthony Barboza, Getty Images)
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