TV Keeps the Dreams--and Dross Alive

Epic moments no longer must die or fade, thanks to television. They now live on as important video reference points--aspirations from the past, for example, to be weighed against accomplishments of the present.

Or lack of accomplishments.

Sunday marks the 25th anniversary of the great march on Washington organized by civil right leaders pledged to peaceful desegregation and equal opportunity for all Americans.

The memory lingers in blurry TV pictures of the enormous throng of participants from across the nation and of Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lincoln Memorial, delivering his stirring “I Have a Dream” speech that still brings chills, even in mental reruns.

So we’ve come here today to dramatize a shameful condition. In a sense, we have come to our nation’s capital to cash a check.

“I will never forget it,” Dick Gregory wrote afterward about the exhilarating event that capped a summer of racial violence and political tensions. “It was wall-to-wall black folks and white folks, over a quarter of a million of us. I had never seen so many black folks and white folks together this side of a race riot.”

Gregory, the comedian and social activist, went on to give his impression of King on that steamy hot day of jubilation:

“It seemed as if the very cells of his body were charged with new life and renewed spirit. As if the magic of the day, the nobility of the cause had been transformed into a potent elixir and absorbed into the very cells of his body, infusing him with optimism, courage and joy. It was contagious.”

All these years later, it is still contagious.

You can have the TV speeches of George Bush or Michael Dukakis or even Jesse Jackson, each of whom was celebrated in recent weeks for rallying his constituency with oratory. King spoke not from a prepared text or a TelePrompTer, but from the heart, spoke words that were his own at a tense time when his leadership was being challenged by militants within the civil rights movement.

And such words.

Go back to Mississippi. Go back to Alabama. Go back to South Carolina. Go back to Georgia. Go back to Louisiana. Go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair.

I came across a transcript of that speech the other day and began reading it for the first time. Its rhythms, eloquent phrasing and powerful ideas fused with my memory of King’s rich voice and those black-and-white TV pictures of him.

Ironically, a “Donahue” segment happened to be playing on KNBC Channel 4 as I read the speech, a segment as repugnant as the speech was inspiring. There I sat--King’s speech on my lap, white supremacist leader Tom Metzger and his mimicking son on the screen spewing hate while denying a former comrade’s charge that they had him savagely beaten after he rejected their movement. These marshmallows endorse violence? How could anyone even imagine it?

Phil Donahue was in his fairness mode to a fault that day, being almost nauseatingly polite to the older Metzger as if owing objectivity and dispassion to this dangerous, smooth-talking racist who heads the White American Political Assn. and the White Aryan Resistance Group.

Despite his abhorrent philosophy, Metzger has the same First Amendment rights of other Americans. So the City Council of Kansas City, Mo., was wrong and shortsighted recently in using a disputed legal maneuver to deny Metzger’s talk show, “Race and Reason,” time on the city’s cable access channel merely because of the ideas the show espouses.

That doesn’t mean, however, that Donahue should treat Metzger gently and pass the prosecutorial buck to the studio audience, or especially that Donahue should go out of his way to give Metzger or anyone else of his miserable ilk a national stage by having him on as a guest.

What about knowing thine enemy? A far better grasp of the evil potential of white supremacist groups is available from the new Costa-Gavras film “Betrayed,” which, despite being manipulative and deeply flawed as drama, is valuable viewing for Americans.

I don’t know why, but I continued listening to the “Donahue” segment while also reading King’s speech, at once hearing the voices of Metzger the hate-monger from the set and King the love-monger from within, their clashing messages vying for my attention.

It was a mismatch, the twisted logic and tinny diatribes of the smirking racist gradually becoming eclipsed by the more powerful visionary words of the martyred civil rights leader.

I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

A 25-year-old black man named Charles Washburn was in a Chicago TV station when rhetoric from the Washington march first reached his ears.

With a bachelor’s degree in business from Kentucky State University, a certificate in telecasting from the Milwaukee Institute of Technology and directing experience at a Milwaukee station behind him, he was being interviewed for a job at NBC-owned WNBQ (now WMAQ).

Friends had told him the station was seeking “a Negro qualified to work there in an assistant directing capacity.” They told him the timing was perfect, that the publicity leading to the Washington march had put heat on TV stations to hire blacks.

If WNBQ really intended to hire a black assistant director, Washburn reasoned, surely it would hire him, because “it was a rare black in the area who had my credentials.”

He recalls the interview with a station executive while a TV in the office was tuned to NBC’s live coverage of the march. He recalls the words of marchers coming from the set: “We’re marching for jobs and human dignity!” And he recalls thinking: “I’m getting my job, a job that a black has never held before at this station.”

Washburn was confident. Without a doubt, his small corner of King’s dream was coming true.

This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we shall be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.

But the check that King earlier spoke of wasn’t to be cashed by Washburn then. Following the interview, he never heard from the station again.

Two months later, he did hear from friends with contacts inside the station that WNBQ “didn’t hire anyone for the job, and they never intended to.” Washburn concluded from this that his interview was a kind of window dressing intended only to give an impression that the station was moving toward hiring blacks for meaningful positions.

Washburn put it all behind him, going on to earn a master’s degree in radio and TV from Syracuse University and ultimately moving to Los Angeles, where he has spent the past decade as a production manager and assistant director in TV and theatrical movies, while also writing scripts.

One of them, a page from his own life, is about two black youths growing up in a Memphis housing project in the 1940s and 1950s.

Meanwhile, the color of TV continues to change only in tints. Washburn laments that dramatic stories about blacks remain a near-impossible sale in white-minded Hollywood. An aspiring film director, he wonders if he “would have been whatever I wanted to be in this town by now if that barrier--that 16th of an inch of skin--hadn’t been so visible.”

And he thinks about that day in Chicago 25 years ago, when the heady atmosphere of civil rights marchers became the backdrop to his own dream.

And when this happens, and when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: “Free at last. Free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.”