April 4, 1968: Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Death and How It Changed America
Written and Narrated By: Michael Eric Dyson
Length: 6 hrs and 25 mins
A wandering academic treatise… with flourishes of purple prose…
I s’pose it’s good that author Michael Eric Dyson devotes a bit here, a bit there about how MLK Jr. was thrust onto the sky-high-est of pedestals during life but especially after his death. Good cuz last year? M’ husband was watching a BioPic and turned to me with an astounded, “Did you know Martin Luther King had a buncha affairs?!”
Which had me dashing to the gods o’ google to discover that, oh yeh almighty, the guy did NOT treat his wife well.
Oh well, Dyson makes a point to argue for our heroes and leaders to be accepted as flawed human beings… ya know, the way we all are. Still, it made going into the annual MLK Day Listen for 2023 just a weee bit, well, I was prepared for a huuuge stamping down of m’ own prejudices as a woman in a patriarchal society who’s near Up To HERE with male heroes being jerks to those who support, motivate, inspire, and who gosh-YES! take courageous and decisive action on their own. You know: Women Who’ve ROCKED but have been largely forgotten because the men of the era largely stepped upon them.
We don’t stand on the shoulders of giants; dude! we stand on a lot of women.
So there’s that as I began April 4, 1968, FEELING yes, but also HOPING to reconnect with the man’s courage and determination, his vastly stirring oratorial skills, just how AWEsome he was.
Uhm… nope.
Rather, this is a long meandering scholarly treatise which relies heavily upon mere snippets o’ speeches that remind us that not for an instant was MLK Jr. able to forget his mortality, and that he constantly reminded those around him that he was destined for an early death. Actually, that’s just for about a third of this work.
The second third? Well, I admit to dozing off several times because it has NOTHING to do with King but is a reminder of the gross abuses done by both political parties to Black Americans, the impoverished, who happen to be Black Americans, the inequity of justice between classification of offenses and especially the War On Crime. It’s just a loooong and, somewhat, angry diatribe which I totally get: It was awful, continues to be awful. It’s just that Dyson drags out his technical jargon as he vents so that it becomes sooo dry even as he spins some “prettily-worded” rhetorical flourishes.
>yaaaawn<
The third part is of the successors to King, and dang! does Dyson hop on a high horse, or what?! I mean, first he goes to great pains to show that Jesse Jackson clambered up to hunker over the gunned down MLK Jr. and spread the man’s blood all over his shirt, and wore the shirt as he took on any and all interviews that he could commandeer. Dyson depicts him as having his nose plastered to the glass as he drooled to become welcomed to the rarified societal heights that MLK Jr. came from. And THAT’S when Dyson is being kind.
So a trifle hilarious as he takes on Jackson, yes, but also Al Sharpton. And even Sharpton’s hair.
But with Dyson narrating this himself, he DRONES. Oh yes he does, until he gets to various quotes from various No-Longer-On-Pedestal-Luminaries. At which point he bends and twists his voice so that one is very aware that one is listening to a well-rehearsed impersonation. He does well enough, King deserves the gravitas Dyson infuses into his words, and it’s laudable that Dyson mimics the same rhythms and emphases that King did. But I’ve little patience with vocal gyrations, esPECially if they’re interspersed with HEAvily-laden DRONING.
Now we get to the Epilogue which was vaaaastly entertaining as it’s an entirely fictitious interview between Dyson and King should the man have to lived to be interviewed on his 80th birthday. In the purplest of prose, Dyson posits that King would’ve broken down walls regarding the taboo subject of mental health within society, particularly Black society. He also would’ve, presumably, and in the most glowing of terms (PURPLE PROSE), passed the crown to Barack Obama, saying he’d lead the Black (And FINALLY notes Brown!) masses to a greater nation.
…okay…
All in all? The droning killed me; the academic nature of the jargon killed me; the flowery language when Dyson got on a roll made me laugh; the various unkindness(es) he tossed at various leading lights were even more hiLARious when I s’pose it was just to show that Dyson was going for Warts And All Evenhanded Writing. But dude? when you choose to make the last line, the very last line, of what you’re offering as dead serious political/social commentary: “I LOVE OPRAH!”?!
Oh gosh, when you do THAT, you make me horribly aware that I just spent 10+ hours on something that I’m not even certain you meant to be Serious Commentary… Yeh yeh yeh, this is only 6 1/2-hours -BUT-
I dozed… rePEATedly…
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