Tavis Smiley talks to Antonio Mora

Antonio Mora: I want to start with the book (“Death of a King: The Real Story of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Final Year”) and with the fact that — probably fair to say that when you were a child and a teenager — you were pretty obsessed with King. You listened to his speeches.

Tavis Smiley: When I was 12, my father did something once in his life. It never happened after that and had not happened before. But my father lost his temper one night. I’d been accused of something in my church, which wasn’t true, and sadly the minister of the church didn’t call me or my sister. My sister had been accused as well. Didn’t call either one of us in, Antonio, to ask us whether or not this was true, what had happened, no questions asked. Just got up in front of the entire church and in front of this massive congregation and accused my sister and I of having done something that we didn’t do — my sister and me, to be grammatically correct. And my father lost his temper that night. We got home. He beat us so severely that we were in the hospital, both of us, for almost two weeks in traction. I’m a 12-year-old kid. I’m lying in this hospital trying to figure out how this has happened to me.

“How did this happen to me? Why did this happen? I can’t make any sense of this.” A member of my church bequeathed to me this gift box full of LP recordings of Dr. King. It turns out that Berry Gordy, when he was writing “Motown” was smart enough to send an engineer around to just follow Dr. King and record a lot of what he said. I think most Americans think that King only gave one speech in his life — “That my children will live in a nation where they’ll not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” That’s all we know of that speech. But Berry Gordy had this guy following King around, and later Gordy put out some of these records. And so this guy at my church was collecting them, and as a gift, for some reason, he just gave this to me. And as a 12-year-old, when I’m trying to figure out why this has happened to me, I hear the love in his voice and the hope in his soul and the reassurance that was for me.

So here King is speaking to the nation about love and the power of love and how love is the only force that can turn an enemy into a friend. Nothing in the world as powerful as love. He's talking to a nation, but he might as well have been talking to me, Antonio, because I could hear him saying to me, "Tavis, you’re gonna have to love your way through this, that hate is not an option. You gotta forgive people." And that spoke to me in a profound way and while he had been dead for years, at that moment in that experience, he really saved my life.

Most of us know him as the man who gave that speech, as the man who was the great civil rights leader who stood up to segregation, who won the Nobel Peace Prize. That’s not what you’re writing about in this book. You are focused on the last year of his life, when things had changed pretty dramatically. Why did you decide to do that?

Why is that year important? Because April 4, 1967, he’s here in New York to give the speech “Beyond Vietnam.” He comes out against the war in Vietnam here at the Riverside Church in Manhattan. He refers to America as the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today. That’s a strong indictment from a black man to a white nation.

And it created quite the backlash.

Ooh, Lord. God, did it. The next day everybody and everything started to turn against him. So he gives this speech where he utters that phrase, and then he starts talking about the triple threat in that speech, the triple threat of racism, poverty and militarism. Long story short — as long as this Negro was staying in the lane of civil rights, he was OK and acceptable. But when he started talking about foreign policy and when he starts saying that budgets are moral documents and the money you’re wasting over there in Vietnam should be spent here at home and the bombs that are dropping there are landing in the ghettos and barrios of American cities and that war is the enemy of the poor, they turned on Martin King in that very last year.

And they turned on him in a pretty substantial way. I’m old enough to remember the accusations of him being a communist, and the reality was it wasn’t just white America who turned against him, although you write about how 75 percent of whites thought he was irrelevant at that point. A good majority of blacks also believed the same thing. Part of it was the rise of the Black Panther Party and young people being more attracted to people who were more militant than he was.

Yes. It was tough. We’ve so deified him in death, it’s hard to juxtapose the deification with the demonization of him in life.

It’s been forgotten.

Absolutely. So after that speech, the White House turns on him. So he and [Lyndon] Johnson had worked on voting rights and civil rights, the two most I think important pieces of legislation of the 20th century. So now he’s against Johnson on the war in Vietnam. So the White House turns on him. As you mentioned, the media turns on him. White America turns on him and then black America. You mentioned the 75 percent of Americans who thought he was irrelevant. That number was almost 60 percent in black America thought he was persona non grata so that the NAACP and Roy Wilkins come out against this guy. Whitney Young and the [National] Urban League publicly come out against Dr. King. 

And obviously history would be incomplete if we didn’t know what happened in that past year. But why do you think it’s so important to focus on that and on what his struggles were then?

As human beings, I think, we come to know who we really are in the darkest, most difficult days of our lives. And so if you think you know Dr. King but you don’t know the dark and difficult moment for him, which was that last year, then you really don’t know him yet.

And you can’t really appreciate him as I do until you understand how he traversed and navigated that last year, because the Martin that I love the best is not the Martin of “I Have a Dream.” It’s not the Martin that of the Montgomery bus boycott. It’s not even the Martin of the Nobel Peace Prize. The Martin that I love the best is the one who, when everything and everybody turned against him, kept speaking his truth. He kept marching. He kept telling it like it is. He would not back down, and that’s the Martin that I most celebrate. 

Was he depressed? And what do you think would have happened to him if he had lived? Do you think he would have been marginalized even further, or do you think he somehow would have overcome what was happening in that last year of his life?

Yes, he was depressed from time to time. He was admitted into the hospital any number of times over the last few years for what they officially said was exhaustion. And he felt this death angel hovering over him, so he knew his time was limited.

So he was driving himself to organize this Poor People’s Campaign even faster than he typically would because he felt that his time was running out. Your second question — if he had lived, would he have been marginalized. Absolutely. He was being marginalized in the last year of his life in part because the bourgeois elite Negroes were mad at him for angering the president, who had been their friend. And the everyday black folk, the younger black folk particularly were getting excited by Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown and Huey Newton and the black power, Black Panther thing. So he really didn’t have a constituency even in his own community. 

What would he say if now, 46 years later, if he saw a black president, if he saw that there has been great progress on race issues but that there continues to be racism and discrimination in this country. 

The best example of what he might be saying today — because I don’t want to put words in his mouth — the closest thing to him seeing a black president in his lifetime was his seeing the first black mayor of a major American city, who was Carl Stokes in Cleveland. And King spent a lot of time in Cleveland campaigning for Carl Stokes for him to get elected mayor. And so he certainly would have involved himself in the [Barack] Obama campaign if he’d been asked to be used as a surrogate. They might not have asked him, because his truth is so subversive, they might not have want[ed] him on the campaign trail. And once Obama got elected, he would have said to him, “Now, I love you, but I’m gonna be your critic, and I’m gonna push you, and I’m gonna hold you accountable to those things that are in the best interest of the American people.” Dr. King never believed that anything he ever had to say, Antonio, could not have been said in love. He’s always trying to give his critique in love, but he wasn’t afraid to give a critique.

And it’s interesting that you bring that up, because, in fact, going back to before the election, where Obama first became president of the United States, you weren’t uncritical of the president. You brought up issues, and you got a lot of grief for it. How do you feel about the president today, and has he done his job, especially when it comes to race? Because I know in 2011 you said that he has failed American blacks.

Yes. I think that the president has a difficult job, and I certainly am pulling and praying for him every day not just to be another garden-variety politician but to be a statesman. He could have been that on Ferguson, and he missed the opportunity in Ferguson, Missouri, to be a statesman and chose to be another garden-variety politician, send somebody else there, Eric Holder, namely, but didn’t really want to get involved in that.

Should he have gone to Ferguson, you think?

He absolutely should have gone to Ferguson.

Even though Martin Luther King didn’t go to Newark or Detroit, if we go back to riots that happened back in his time.

King wasn’t the president, though. Obama is. I make the distinction all the time. King is a prophet. Obama is the president, and the president of this country, whether you’re black or white, Republican or Democrat, if there is a major crisis in this country in a major American city or a city next to a major American city, like Ferguson is to St. Louis, is on fire and there — the city’s been militarized and the city is burning and people are rioting and protesting and being killed and being beaten and being Maced, the president ought to step into that situation. So I’m not going to let Barack Obama off the hook for not going to Ferguson any more than I’d let George Bush off the hook for not going to New Orleans.

Ferguson was less about black and white and wrong and right and more about the dignity and the humanity of fellow citizens. And if you’re the president of the United States, I don’t care if they’re black, red, brown or yellow, when you have that kind of militarization taking place in an American city, the president ought to be intimately involved. So I thought it was an epic fail when he didn’t step into the role of being a statesman and decided still and decided rather to be a pretty calculating politician why he shouldn’t get more involved.

If you look at what happened there, you’ve got this city that is majority African-American, with virtually no representation on the police force or in the City Council of African-Americans. We recently had on my show, “Consider This” — we had one of the top officials from the NAACP, and he talked about how one of the problems there was the absolute lack of participation in the democratic process in elections by African-Americans in Ferguson, that that may have led to them having so little representation. Why is that happening, and what needs to be done? Because that certainly has to be a part of this conversation on race.

King said when he was living, Antonio, that the Negro in the South could not vote and the Negro in the North had nothing for which to vote. So we can condemn and critique and criticize the black folk in Ferguson for not voting, and certainly voting is one instrument of justice, one instrument of democracy in this country. But for whom were they voting? What were the choices? So I’m prepared to critique them in Ferguson for not having voted in higher — at higher levels in the past. But again, back to King’s philosophy, for whom were they voting? What were their choices, really? So it’s not either or. It’s both, and we have got take those issues seriously.

I was very disappointed, and I’m just skeptical of the Democratic Party for using this issue, as you’ve been reading lately, to whip up African-American voters across the country, to get them turned out for the midterm elections. 

Talking about that national conversation on race — you and your frequent sparring partner Bill O’Reilly have gotten into it on this before. He keeps saying, as many other conservatives do, that African-Americans need to take more responsibility about what’s happening in their communities.

There is no issue in black America that is not a tentacle, is not an offshoot of the primary issue that plagues black America, which is poverty. In America these days there is a highway into poverty but not even a sidewalk out. And what’s wrong with this conversation about personal responsibility is that we disconnect it from a lack of opportunity. We disconnect it from a lack of employment. We disconnect it from affordable education. And so poverty ends up being the primary source of so many of these problems. And that’s not a black issue. It’s not a brown issue. It’s an American problem.

You know, here at Al Jazeera America we do serious news. We don’t do tabloid. We don’t do much entertainment. So I suspect I am going to be the first person on this network to ever utter the following four words: “Dancing With the Stars.”

And you might be the last. You know what? I never thought I would utter those words either, in part because if you would ask me this, you know, five, 10 years ago, the answer would have been no. And when they did ask me this year, I told them no three times. On the third time, they said to me, “Just take a meeting with us.” And I took a meeting — long story short — and after the meeting, I sat down at my house, at my kitchen table, pulled out my pad, threw a line down the middle of the page — pros, cons. And it turned out, to my surprise and to my horror, quite frankly, that the reasons for doing the show outweighed the reasons for not doing the show, namely because I’m about to turn 50. And I figured I would do one last stupid, foolish, ridiculous thing before I turned 50. And this is it. This is definitely it.

Was one of the pros wearing a sparkly costume?

I will not be doing that, I can guarantee you. I had a long talk. I said, “You know what?I get final approval over what I wear.” We’re not going out like that. I’m not gonna be on YouTube the rest of my life with a sparkly costume on.

As you say, you and I are about the same age, but your knees are even more messed up than mine, and mine are pretty messed up. How are you going do it?

It’s tough. I mean, when I leave here tonight, I’m going to a six-hour dance rehearsal. I mean, my dancing partner, Sharna Burgess, is actually traveling with me while I’m on book tour. At the end of these long book tour days, anywhere from four to six hours every night, we dance. And it’s getting me in great shape, which is a beautiful thing. I had a friend of mine tell me, “Tavis, when you turn 50, man, you gonna look like 25.” He said, “You gonna feel like 75, but you gonna look like 25.”

Yeah. That’s probably right. You haven’t aged much, but you know …

But you know, there is a serious answer to this as well, other than I wanted to do something silly before I turned 50, and this is it. On a serious note, though, I love my parents, but I was raised in a very, very strict home.

And there was no dancing.

Yes. And there was no dancing. Not just dancing, Antonio. I couldn’t even listen to secular music. I had to sneak to watch “Soul Train” and sneak to watch “American Bandstand.” My parents were so serious about keeping us on, you know, that straight and narrow path, and sometimes, I think, a little too harsh and a little too strict. I love them to death, but a little too strict and a little too hard. And so here I was in college, and there were songs I’d never heard. I’d never been to a movie. My first movie, I’ll never forget, was “Purple Rain.” I’d never been to a movie theater.

I didn't know how to pay, how to get in. I didn’t know they had popcorn. I’d never gone to a movie theater, and I was in college. So there were so many things I couldn’t do as a young person, and I’ve tried to redeem the time, shall we say. So here I am, 50, and I can dance, but I never learned really how to dance. I said, “You know what?Here’s an opportunity, and they’re going pay me to do this too.”