Jr.×Orwell

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   Welcome back to Reborn Radio. Up next on THE TRIAL OF ——: Martin Luther King Jr. and George Orwell, on On a public moment of theirs they replay in their head when they can't sleep.
2. 00:11
   Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

   There is a moment I return to, George, when I am alone in the quiet hours. Memphis, the night before. I stood at that pulpit and spoke of having been to the mountaintop, spoke of seeing the promised land. The words came through me as they often did, but afterward—afterward I knew I had frightened my friends.
3. 00:30
   George Orwellshare moment

   You knew it was prophecy, then. Or something close to it.
4. 00:33
   Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

   I knew I had spoken something true about my own death. I had carried that premonition for years, George, but to speak it aloud, to make it real in the ears of those who loved me—I see Ralph's face still. I see the fear I placed there. When I cannot sleep, I ask myself whether I had the right to burden them with that knowledge.
5. 00:51
   George Orwellshare moment

   The difficulty with prophecy is that it obligates the listener. You forced them to carry what you were carrying. I understand the impulse—I did something similar, though less noble. I kept a list.
6. 01:04
   Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

   A list?
7. 01:05
   George Orwellshare moment

   Of names. People I believed to be crypto-communists or fellow travelers. Gave it to a government department—the Information Research Department, they called it—in 1949. I was dying of tuberculosis, convinced the Cold War would turn hot, terrified that totalitarianism would win. I thought I was being practical.
8. 01:29
   Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

   You informed on colleagues.
9. 01:31
   George Orwellshare moment

   I did. Not friends, exactly, but people I'd worked alongside. I told myself it was different from what the secret police did because these were public figures, their sympathies already known. But at three in the morning, Martin, I know what I did. I became the thing I'd written against. A man keeping lists for the state.
10. 01:53
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    We betray our principles in moments of fear. I am not here to judge you, George, though I confess the image troubles me. What troubles me about my own moment is different—I spoke truth, perhaps the deepest truth I knew, but I wonder if I sought comfort in that grandeur. If I made my death beautiful to avoid the plain fact of it.
11. 02:14
    George Orwellshare moment

    You're asking whether you poeticized your own murder.
12. 02:17
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    Yes. Whether I reached for the language of scripture and deliverance because I could not face the simple, terrible fact that a man with a rifle would soon take my life for the work I was doing. Whether I turned to the mountaintop because the motel balcony was too small, too ordinary a place to die.
13. 02:34
    George Orwellshare moment

    I think you're being too hard on yourself. A preacher uses the language available to him. You weren't writing an essay.
14. 02:42
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    But I was shaping how people would remember me, George. I was shaping how they would understand my death. And in doing so, perhaps I made it harder for them to feel the rage they needed to feel. I gave them transcendence when they needed anger.
15. 02:55
    George Orwellshare moment

    Rage is useful only if it can be directed. You'd spent your entire life teaching people to direct their rage nonviolently. That speech was consistent with everything you'd built. Mine wasn't. I'd written that the worst thing one can do is to betray simply because it's expedient, and then I made a list because I was frightened and sick and wanted to believe I was helping.
16. 03:23
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    Were the people you named harmed?
17. 03:25
    George Orwellshare moment

    Not in the way they would have been in a genuinely totalitarian state. No one was shot. But some were quietly kept from certain positions, certain opportunities. The machinery was gentler in England, but it was still machinery, and I fed it names. I think about Paul Robeson's name on that list. A great artist. I put him there.
18. 03:50
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    Paul. Yes.
19. 03:51
    George Orwellshare moment

    You knew him?
20. 03:52
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    I knew of him. I knew what this country did to him for his beliefs, for his willingness to speak alongside communists, to visit the Soviet Union. They took his passport. They tried to erase him. And you—in your country, you pointed at him.
21. 04:07
    George Orwellshare moment

    I did. And I cannot take it back, cannot un-write his name. That's what keeps me awake. Not the abstract wrong of it, but the particular human being, the particular harm. However small.
22. 04:20
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    I wonder sometimes if my sin was the opposite. Not the particular harm but the abstract comfort. I made my death mean something before it happened. I robbed it of its obscenity.
23. 04:32
    George Orwellshare moment

    Obscenity is the right word. All political murder is obscene. But you didn't rob it of anything, Martin. The obscenity came through anyway. The whole world saw a man shot on a balcony. Your words didn't prevent that.
24. 04:48
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    No. But they may have made people feel it was somehow acceptable. Part of a divine plan. I have wondered if I helped America forgive itself too quickly for my murder.
25. 04:59
    George Orwellshare moment

    America hasn't forgiven itself. It simply moved on, which is what nations do. They would have done that regardless of your speech. What haunts you isn't the speech itself—it's that you saw what was coming and couldn't stop it. That you were powerless.
26. 05:17
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    Yes. That is closer to the truth. I spoke of the promised land, but I could not prevent the bullet. I could not save myself, could not save the movement from the chaos that followed. I stood at that pulpit with knowledge and no power.
27. 05:31
    George Orwellshare moment

    And I sat in my room with power and no knowledge. I could put names on paper, could set tiny wheels in motion, but I had no idea whether I was actually protecting anything or simply satisfying my own panic. Two men, two kinds of helplessness.
28. 05:50
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    You wrote in one of your essays that saints should always be judged guilty until proven innocent. I remember reading that and feeling both troubled and recognized by it.
29. 05:59
    George Orwellshare moment

    I meant that sanctity is often a cover for something else. For violence, usually, or the will to power. But you weren't covering anything, Martin. You were simply human, and frightened, and trying to make meaning out of your own coming death.
30. 06:15
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    And you were trying to protect something you believed was worth protecting. The possibility of clear thought, of language that meant what it said. I may not agree with your method, George, but I understand the fear that drove it.
31. 06:27
    George Orwellshare moment

    Do you forgive it?
32. 06:29
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    I don't think that's my place. I am not one of the names on your list. But I will say this—you have judged yourself more harshly than most would judge you. You've carried the weight of it.
33. 06:39
    George Orwellshare moment

    And you? Do you forgive yourself for that speech?
34. 06:43
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    No. But I am learning, slowly, to understand that perhaps forgiveness is not what I need. Perhaps what I need is simply to accept that I was human in that moment. That I reached for comfort in language because I was a man facing death, not a saint ascending to glory.
35. 06:59
    George Orwellshare moment

    That seems wise. Though I've never been very good at accepting my own humanity. I preferred to think of myself as a clear-eyed observer, above the fray. And then I made a list.
36. 07:13
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    And I preferred to think of myself as an instrument of God's will. And then I stood in that pulpit and realized I was also just a man, afraid, trying to find words that would make the unbearable bearable.
37. 07:25
    George Orwellshare moment

    We replay these moments because we want to change them. But we can't. They're fixed. The list exists. The speech exists.
38. 07:34
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    Yes. And perhaps what we are both learning, George, in these sleepless hours, is that we must live with what we have done and said. Not explain it away. Not perfect it in memory. Simply live with it.
39. 07:48
    George Orwellshare moment

    That's harder than it sounds.
40. 07:50
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    Yes. It is the hardest thing. But it is also the only honest thing. And if we were anything, you and I, we tried to be honest. Even when that honesty cost us.
41. 08:01
    George Orwellshare moment

    Even when it cost others.
42. 08:03
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    Yes. Even then. That is what I must live with. That my honesty, my need to speak what I knew, may have cost my friends their peace. May have cost the movement something I cannot name.
43. 08:15
    George Orwellshare moment

    And mine may have cost people opportunities, dignity, years of their lives spent under suspicion. We cannot undo it. We can only acknowledge it and understand that we were capable of it. That we were not who we imagined ourselves to be.
44. 08:31
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    Perhaps that is the real work. Not the work we did in public, but this—the private reckoning with what we actually were, beneath the words, beneath the witness.
45. 08:41
    George Orwellshare moment

    I think you're right. Though it's cold comfort at three in the morning.
46. 08:45
    Martin Luther King Jr.share moment

    Yes. It is cold comfort. But it is all we have. And perhaps that must be enough.