Tavis Smiley - The Hidden Dr. King

Tavis Smiley is the well known PBS and public radio talk show host. He is the author of many books including Death of a King:The Real Story of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's Final Year.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr has been shrink-wrapped and formatted to be innocuous and non-threatening. Dream speeches, desegregation, voting rights, and Selma marches could be accommodated. But when he articulated a critique of the system as a whole then he became a danger to the establishment. That Dr. King has been largely obscured. At Riverside Church in New York he said the Vietnam War was "a symptom of a far deeper malady." And then he added, "We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a 'thing-oriented' society to a 'person-oriented' society. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring." By giving that speech Dr. King basically signed his own death warrant.