'Meet the Press' transcript for April 6, 2008

MR. RUSSERT:  Tom Brokaw, Michael Eric Dyson, Ambassador Andrew Young, welcome all.  Let's take you all back to the evening, April 3rd, 1968, the Mason Temple, Memphis, Tennessee.  Here's Martin Luther King Jr.

(Videotape)

REV. DR. KING:  I've been to the mountaintop, and I don't mind.  Like anybody, I would like to live a long life.  Longevity has its place.  But I'm not concerned about that now.  I just want to do God's will.  And he's allowed me to go up to the mountain, and I've looked over, and I've seen the promised land.  I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!  So I'm happy tonight.  I'm not worried about anything.  I'm not fearing any man.  Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

(End videotape)

MR. RUSSERT:  "I'm not fearing any man." Less than 24 hours later, this was the scene at the Lorraine Motel on the balcony.  There's--on the far left of your screen, that's Andrew Young, pointing to where shots--a single shot rang out.  Then there's Andrew Young kneeling over the body there of Martin Luther King Jr., and shortly thereafter, days later, Andrew Young standing next to the open coffin bearing the body of Martin Luther King Jr.

Ambassador Young, take us back to the evening of April 3rd and the day of April 4th, your memories and the lasting lessons in your mind.

AMB. ANDREW YOUNG:  Well, my memory of April 3rd was that Martin was ill.  He was running a fever.  And it was raining, and so he decided not to go to Mason Temple because he thought there might not be a big crowd.  And then, when we got there, it seats 11,000 and it was packed out.  So we called him, and he decided that he would come, and he said, "But, Ralph, you make the speech, and I'll just make a few remarks at the end." Ralph made a great speech.  It was the best introduction I think I'd ever heard him give Martin.  And Martin, of course, made the speech that you just heard.

But the next day, he was a different person altogether.  He was almost childishly frivolous.  He was laughing and joking.  His brother had come to town.  There was a gathering of friends.  And it was almost as though a weight had been lifted off of him.  And, and then a shot rang out.

But really, I think we've got to go back to the march on Washington to understand what his life was all about.  And the march on Washington, while we talk about the dream, the march on Washington basically said that America had presented the negro with a bad check and that he saw the Constitution as a promissory note for equality and justice of opportunity for all Americans. And he was going to Washington again in 1968 because he realized it was not just the negro that was being shortchanged economically in our democracy.  And so that poor people's campaign was raising the question of whether or not America could survive with people on lonely islands of poverty in the midst of this ocean of material wealth.  And that was the thing that was driving us to Washington.  He knew we couldn't change it, but he felt that he had to make that witness.  He always used to say you have no choice about, you know, being born or dying.  The only thing you have a choice about is what you die for. And we tried to tell him, "Let's wait until after the election." And he said, "No, we've got to go now," that the bonus marches in the '30s went and they got run out by Douglas McCarthy and teargassed, and the same thing might happen to us.  But Franklin Roosevelt used that to introduce the New Deal. And the next president must deal with poverty in America.

Now, 40 years later, it's almost like we're Rip Van Winkle, having slept through a revolution.  And yet today--or yesterday, Martin Luther King III called on all of the candidates to take up that call, and we've had a very good response from all three of the candidates, Democrat and Republicans. Even Newt Gingrich over in the American Enterprise Institute was taking up what he called "the Obama challenge." So I think we've got something to talk about other than polls and statistics and what might happen when.  We have a real issue, and that is poverty in America and how do we deal with the economic injustices that are affecting people at the bottom of our economy.

MR. RUSSERT:  Michael Eric Dyson, in your book, "April 4th, 1968:  Martin Luther King Jr.'s Death and How it Changed America," you write this:  "[This book] aims to understand just how dominant death was in King's life--how he fought death and faced it down all the same, even as he used death to rally his people in the fight for justice.  By probing how King embraced death's inevitability to shape his social agenda, we may better understand how he secured his legacy on the bloody battlefields of racial transformation." Very much echoing what Ambassador Young said, he understood death, he accepted it, but it's what you do when you're alive and trying to change people lives.

DR. MICHAEL ERIC DYSON:  Absolutely right.  I think Ambassador Young hit it right on the--the nail right on the head.  And he was right there.  He's an American hero along with Dr. King.

But Dr. King understood that the white supremacists, the people who were defending the status quo were dead-set against him.  And so he's trying to clip the wings of Jim Crow.  But as he rose higher in the pantheon of the American consciousness, people began to embrace Martin Luther King Jr., initially being distant from him, but certainly embracing him.  Especially when more radical elements within and militant minorities within African-American culture emerged, Dr. King became an American hero in many senses, but he also always fought against those perceptions that he was somehow undermining and subverting American democracy and not reinforcing it. And so he was threatened every day of his life.  Can one imagine, Tim, that every day you get up some credible threat of death is before you?  And so publicly he articulated his resistance to death.  He said he had--any man who hadn't found anything he was willing to die for wasn't fit to live, and yet he battled personally against the kind of existential anxiety that inevitably falls upon a person who's confronting that death.  But his bravery and courage was despite the legitimate challenges and the credible threats, he moved on and used his death to say, "If I die, this movement will not die.  If my blood mixes with the soil of our common history, what will sprout from it will be the possibility of transforming America." And he said nothing could be more redemptive.  That's an extraordinary man and arguably the greatest American we've produced.

MR. RUSSERT:  Tom, it was a long struggle.  You have a special tonight, 8 PM on the History Channel, called "King." I want to show you a clip from that. This is 1956, way back then.  Let's watch.

(Videotape from "King")

MR. TOM BROKAW:  Despite the dangers he faced, King held fast to the boycott and his nonviolent philosophy, a revolutionary strategy that stunned even his followers.  King's tactics paid off more than a year after the boycott began. The Supreme Court outlawed segregation of public buses.  The boycott was over, and a new movement had begun.

REV. DR. KING:  And the Negro citizens of Montgomery are urged to return to the buses tomorrow morning on a nonsegregated basis.

(End videotape)

MR. RUSSERT:  Fifty-two years ago.

MR. BROKAW:  He was 26 years old, Tim, when he started that.  And what I think is lost in our memory is that how hard it was, what he launched that day, and how long it went on.  It went on from 1956 to 1968.  He was, as Michael indicated, under death threat all the time.

But there were three big, big elements that came through as I reviewed all of this.  One was that the twin motors of his intelligence and his eloquence really drove the movement, and he stuck to nonviolence.  The other part of it was that he had the same language and the same tone when he spoke at the National Cathedral in Washington as he did in the backwoods of Alabama.  And, as that played out on national television, it elevated all of us.  And then finally, they were so much more strategic than anyone realized.  They were constantly thinking about how they were going to pick their next fight and against whom.  That's in part why they want to Birmingham, for example, because they knew they could count on Bull Connor to react the way he did.

MR. RUSSERT:  The police commissioner.

MR. BROKAW:  The police commissioner.

MR. RUSSERT:  To overreact with dogs and fire hoses.

MR. BROKAW:  Absolutely.  And then he went to the Birmingham jail and wrote, I believe, one of the great statements of the last 50 years, a letter from a Birmingham jail, his epistle to--in response to the white clerics who were criticizing him for going too fast and too far all at once.

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