LGM Film Club, Part 147: The Other America

For tonight’s film, let’s watch Martin Luther King’s 1967 speech at Stanford. Titled “The Other America,” here he laid out his late-life quest to fight poverty in a cross-racial campaign that would result in the Poor People’s Campaign the next year, sadly after his assassination and thus his leadership and vision. I spent a summer working at the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site in Atlanta in 1999. Boy do I have some stories about those few months. But anyway, you’d think I’d might get tired of listening to the same King speeches or watching the same King clips. But it really wasn’t true. In the old building of Ebenezer Baptist Church, which is open for tours, we had various recorded speeches we could play. And even though I heard them all several times, they were always worth listening to again. Some of it is that he was simply a great public speaker and some of it was the space, but a lot of it was the various messages and the sheer intelligence and militant humanity behind them.