MLK was consistently disparaged by America’s most prestigious news show
‘Meet the Press’ now celebrates Dr. King, but it was a different story while he was alive
During the April 1, 2018, episode of Meet the Press, billed as “the longest-running television program in history,” moderator Chuck Todd noted the 50th anniversary of the death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and used the occasion to play an inspiring clip of Dr. King from one of his appearances on the program.
“Dr. King was on Meet the Press five times, and in an appearance in 1965, Dr. King explained his advocacy of nonviolent disobedience,” he said.
While five times may sound like a lot, keep in mind that these appearances took place over more than a decade — 1957 to 1968 — during which time Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was one of the most important political figures in the country.
But it gets worse. During those few appearances on Meet the Press, Dr. King was subjected to hostile and demeaning interrogations that had little to do with the struggle against Jim Crow. Lacking an understanding of the lived black experience in America, pundits and reporters were less interested in learning about race relations from King than in grilling him about his tactics, goals, and relationships with others in the movement, especially “known communists.” King spent nearly all his time on Meet the Press playing defense rather than having the honest conversation about race that white America needed (and still needs).
Chuck Todd made no mention of that. To be fair, Todd did acknowledge how few times Dr. King appeared on Meet the Press. But by playing only a carefully chosen, majestic-sounding clip from one of these appearances, Todd is whitewashing his show’s troubled history with the civil rights leader.
Every civil rights anniversary is an opportunity for news programs to play some of Dr. King’s words and bask in his reflected glory. The irony is that these are the same news outlets that treated him so badly when he was alive.
Time for a reality check.
In 1957, the biggest media coup you could score was having your face appear on the cover of Time magazine, America’s most read newsweekly. The Reverend M.L. King of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, earned this honor for his role as leader of Montgomery’s successful yearlong bus boycott.
Time’s cover story was highly sympathetic, and from the moment it appeared, “the mantle of fame fell ever more personally on King,” wrote historian Taylor Branch.
Days later came the call from Lawrence E. Spivak, the co-creator and power broker of Meet the Press, who wanted Dr. King on the show as soon as possible.
TV news was tiny compared with what it would become — the networks’ evening newscasts were just 15 minutes long — but by 1957 Spivak was already a powerful figure thanks to Meet the Press, which he co-created along with journalist Martha Rountree.
In the show’s original format, the moderator, Rountree, had a minimal role. All the questions came from the four-person reporters’ panel. That was where Spivak inserted himself. Even though he was not a reporter, he became the show’s chief inquisitor and best-known personality, if not its best loved.
“The childish petulance of Mr. Spivak can be frightfully tiresome,” the New York Times’ trenchant TV critic, Jack Gould, wrote. “In interviewing prominent figures in the news he is obviously much beyond his ken.”
Spivak didn’t care what critics thought of his abrasive manner, as long as the title of his program was showing up in Monday morning’s newspapers.
“There have been years when ‘Meet the Press’ made front-page news as frequently as forty weeks out of fifty-two,” he boasted in 1960.
Spivak’s obsession with making news dovetailed neatly with Capitol Hill politicians’ desire to be on the news. During the 1950s and ’60s, numerous U.S. senators had more appearances on MTP than Dr. King ever would. (Stuart Symington, known mostly to Missourians, had nine.)
By February 1957, Spivak had become a force to be reckoned with in Washington. So when he called King to ask if he would like to be the second-ever African American on Meet the Press — Roy Wilkins of the NAACP had been the first — he expected the young minister to be flattered by the offer.
If King was flattered, he didn’t show it.
He promised Spivak that he’d clear a date on his calendar, but he never did. It took three years to get King on Meet the Press, and when he finally appeared, Spivak — perhaps peeved about the long delay — did not play the gracious host.
On April 17, 1960, Dr. King appeared on the show as students were staging sit-ins at segregated lunch counters. The civil rights leader spent the show fending off hostile questions, like this one from Spivak:
“Harry Truman recently said this, and I quote, ‘If anyone came to my store and sat down, I would throw him out. Private business has its own rights and can do what it wants.’ Now, former President Truman is an old friend of the Negro, I believe. Isn’t this an indication that the sit-in strikes are doing the race, the Negro race, more harm than good?”
May Craig, Gannett’s Washington correspondent, was even more patronizing: “Dr. King, this is a nation that lives under law. Above the Supreme Court is engraved, ‘Equal Justice Under Law.’ Are each of us to decide when it’s all right to break a law?”
Dr. King tried to explain that “sometimes it is necessary to dramatize an issue because many people are not aware of what is happening.” Indeed, no one on this clueless panel seemed aware that black people had been systematically denied access to public facilities and the ballot for decades because of laws passed throughout the Jim Crow South.
Two more years passed before Dr. King was invited back on the show. This time, he didn’t stonewall Spivak. He turned him down flat.
It was July 1962, and King had joined student activists in Albany, Georgia, for civil disobedience. On Friday, July 27, he was arrested and thrown in jail. Frustrated by the lack of progress in Albany, King decided he could attract more media attention from inside his cell than outside. (He would use this tactic to historic effect in Birmingham in 1964.)
Spivak had already booked King for that Sunday’s broadcast of Meet the Press. When he got word that his star guest was locked up, he placed a frantic call to Albany. According to Taylor Branch, Spivak “was at first dumbfounded, then provoked to a sputtering rage” at King’s decision not to be bailed out.
“Most public figures begged for the chance to appear on the most prestigious network interview show, and Spivak did not relish being turned down in favor of a jail cell,” Branch wrote.
His wrath was apparent the next time King came on the show, in August of 1963. Spivak booked him and the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins to preview the upcoming March on Washington. Spivak then directed all seven of his questions to Wilkins.
The hostility was especially palpable in this broadcast. With the dignified exception of NBC’s Robert MacNeil, the panel obsessed over what they saw as a coming Negro apocalypse.
“Mr. Wilkins,” Spivak declared, “there are a great many people, as I am sure you know, who believe it would be impossible to bring more than 100,000 militant Negroes into Washington without incidents and possibly rioting.” Whoever those “great many people” were, history would reveal that they were mistaken.
In 1964, Dr. King received the Nobel Peace Prize. He now stood on the world stage. Yet it would be nearly two and a half years before he appeared again on Meet the Press.
It came after the “Bloody Sunday” attack on King and other peaceful marchers in Selma, Alabama, on March 7, 1965. The images had shocked the country, and suddenly Meet the Press was desperate to have the Nobel laureate on the show. He was scheduled to preach in San Francisco that weekend, but NBC arranged for him to be interviewed by satellite.
Spivak being Spivak, he put a noted defender of segregation on the panel, Richmond Times-Dispatch columnist James J. Kilpatrick, who had debated King in 1960 over the legitimacy of the movement.
While Kilpatrick played to the states’ rights crowd, Spivak bore in on another subject popular with white conservatives.
“Dr. King,” he asked, “have communists infiltrated the movement?”
“The philosophical undergirdings of our movement would make communism impossible,” King calmly replied, since the civil rights movement, unlike communism, was “based on a philosophy of nonviolence.”
For his fourth appearance on Meet the Press, King had company — lots of it.
This 90-minute special edition on August 21, 1966, placed him on a panel of five civil rights leaders, apparently arranged from oldest to youngest. That’s Dr. King speaking from the back bench with Stokely Carmichael and James Meredith.
Dr. King returned to MTP on August 13, 1967, for a discussion that was noticeably different in its tone and content.
He had gone in expecting to be grilled about recent statements from H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael, who represented the movement’s Black Power wing. Instead, Spivak started with an open-ended question about King and the Vietnam War.
“You said that if the war in Vietnam is escalated it may be necessary to engage in civil disobedience,” asked Spivak. “What did you mean by that?”
King, who had been struggling to call attention to his anti-war stance, clearly welcomed the question.
“I meant that if the war continued and if it was escalated, if it continued to pervade the life of our nation in terms of poisoning much of its soul, it would be necessary for thousands of people who found that war abominable to engage in acts that would arouse the conscience of the nation,” King replied. “This war is destroying so much of what we hold dear.”
Also on the panel was Simeon Booker, longtime reporter for Jet magazine. It was a striking contrast from just two years earlier, when Spivak had put a states’ rights southerner on the panel.
Booker asked King the program’s most powerful question, and got the most remarkable answer.
“Dr. King,” he asked, “do you believe that the American racial problem can be solved?”
“Yes, I do,” came the reply. King continued:
“I refuse to despair in this moment. I refuse to allow myself to fall into the dark chambers of pessimism, because I think in any social revolution the one thing that keeps it going is hope, and when hope dies somehow the revolution degenerates into a kind of nihilistic philosophy which says you must engage in disruption for disruption’s sake. … I believe that the forces of goodwill, white and black, in this country can work together to bring about a resolution of this problem. We have the resources to do it. At present we don’t have the will.” By far this was the most cordial and substantive of any of King’s encounters on Meet the Press. And it would be his last.
Years later, Lawrence E. Spivak claimed that Martin Luther King Jr. was the most impressive guest he had ever interviewed on Meet the Press. They love you when you’re dead.
While it’s easy to condemn Spivak’s treatment of MLK during the 1960s, the fact is that he simply reflected the audience that watched him week after week. If Spivak’s questions were condescending, patronizing, vaguely racist, and generally clueless, that’s where a lot of his viewers were regarding race in the 1950s and ’60s.
And that leads to this important takeaway: The news business does not exist to inform you.
It does inform you, of course, but it primarily exists to engage with you. And then sell that engagement to sponsors and underwriters. And in the history of political TV, nobody did that better than Lawrence E. Spivak.
Are you reminded of a certain social media platform when I say “sell your engagement to sponsors”? That’s because nothing in media has really changed in the years since Dr. King appeared on Meet the Press.
Except, of course, that they love him now.
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A version of this article originally appeared on the History is Power blog.
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