TV REVIEW : ‘River’ Shows Drama of King, Memphis Strike

The 25th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination Sunday will inspire various sentiments, spurts of memory and more than a few TV specials, but “At the River I Stand” (at 11 p.m. Sunday on KCET-TV Channel 28) puts King’s cruel felling in Memphis on April 4, 1968, into a profound context.

What brought King to Memphis was a spiral of events that had the superhuman momentum of a revolution.

Memphis sanitation workers, suffering under brutal conditions and earning wages low enough to qualify them for welfare, staged a February, 1968, walkout when two workers were accidentally killed in a truck’s trash compactor. It had been six years since T. O. Jones had tried to organize his fellow workers into a union, and now, it seemed possible.

Filmmakers David Appleby, Dr. Allison Graham and Steven John Ross intercut a raft of period news footage with fresh interviews with many of the witnesses to the Memphis sea-change, and despite Paul Winfield’s subdued narration, you can feel the waves of this sea-change coming at you.

Remarkably, considering that the civil rights movement had long before established itself and won major social victories, it wasn’t quite the force to move its opponents--personified here by Memphis Mayor Henry Loeb--who remained arrogantly intransigent.

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Loeb, a colleague says, had “a plantation mentality,” but the benign dictatorship this implies turned crude and bloody as support grew for the sanitation workers. The film shows that, had Loeb agreed to the workers’ demands to organize, King would never have needed to come to Memphis to lead a mass march. When that march turned violent and beyond King’s control, Memphis became a national battleground: Would established white power create a kind of police state, and would King’s nonviolent dream turn into a nightmare?

The famous “I’ve been to the mountaintop” speech becomes something much more than a sample of flowing King oration in “At the River I Stand.” It is arguably an even greater speech (shown here at great length) than his “I have a dream” masterpiece because, in Memphis, King was responding to a spontaneous movement of poor people, and connecting with previously untapped levels of passion. It was the unorganized nature of events that saw King rise to one of his greatest hours, and probably led to his death.

The combination of the Rev. Harold Middlebrook’s superbly reflective comments, King’s funeral and the workers’ rapid victory ends the film on a note of sad triumph, of exuberant loss, the complex emotions of a nation finding its way.