On Martin Luther King’s birthday, I assign myself to read one of his speeches or letters. I got the idea from friends at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Minority Caucus, who would commemorate the day by sending around King quotes and thoughts about him on the interoffice computer system.

I have continued this tradition for myself, years after leaving the paper, because I wanted to make sure to keep and expand on my own accurate intellectual memory of King. I was half way to 10 when he was killed. My memories of him include standing with my family as King spoke in a baking hot park on the South Side of Chicago. Dr. Strickland, who lived down the street, had a big black umbrella, which I found fascinating. I remember my mother, stunned and still in front of our little black and white TV when the news of King’s assassination was announced. I remember my sister staying at home for days because of riots throughout the city and because of the unrest at her predominantly white North Side high school.

These little freeze frame memories are precious to me, but I know that I have to build on my memory of King, to illuminate it with King’s own words and as much reliable information as possible. I’ve made a promise to myself not to let anyone else – not Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama – define King for me. This is especially important today and it’s especially important for those of us who call ourselves journalists or truth tellers.

Last year in this space, I wrote my thoughts about King’s speech from New York’s Riverside Church, where he shaped and molded his anti-Vietnam stance before an overflowing crowd of more than 3,000 people. That speech was given exactly one year before King was assassinated in Memphis. Reviewing the speech was especially timely last year because of the debate over the Iraq war. King’s comments seemed prescient even from the grave, but yet we still are there in that war. Some politicians are now debating on how best to slowly tiptoe out backwards; others want to stay.

Last night, I read King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” He started the letter in the margins of newspaper and on scraps of paper from a black trusty when he was jailed for integrating lunch counters and non-violently protesting Jim Crow conditions in Birmingham.  King and Ralph Abernathy were arrested on Good Friday, 1963, and were held for eight days. Hundreds of others also had been arrested during the campaign. In “Why We Can’t Wait,” King talks about the days leading up to his arrest. He worries about how funds for producing bond were dwindling and about the wavering morale among his comrades. King also had come under attack from local clergy, which led him to write his letter from the Birmingham jail.

King wrote the Birmingham Jail letter in response to eight clergymen who, in a published letter, had urged him to butt out of the city’s business. I first remember being introduced to King’s Birmingham letter in college by an English teacher who extolled the letter for its organization, narrative and phrasing. I remember it for its lasting phrases.

“I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned

about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere

is a threat to justice everywhere.”

He talked about waiting and what that meant to black people.

“For years now I have heard the word “Wait.” It rings

in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This

“Wait,” has almost always meant “Never.”
And he talked about the pain of telling his children about the realities of his country in the 1960s – of not being able to tell his six-year-old daughter that she couldn’t go to the amusement park she saw advertised on TV. He talked about watching his Negro brothers “smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society,” a haunting image that still hasn’t been erased from our view today.

It still amazing to me how eloquent and powerful King is in his writing, like an orchestra. My fear though is that people will take lines from his music without listening to his whole song, either because they don’t have the time or because it’s not convenient for their cause. That’s why I cringe when I hear most politicians use his words. After reading “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” or the entire “Why We Can’t Wait,” the politician’s goal of getting elected to higher office comes off flat.

So, if you haven’t already done so, spend some time with King today. Learn the history yourself and pass it on to someone else.

Like many of you, I spent last Tuesday night with remote in hand switching back and forth between cable stations trying to keep up with results from the New Hampshire primary. After leaving the rush of daily journalism, covering elections is one of the assignments I really miss. But during this election cycle, I have been disgusted with the coverage more than I have been longing to rejoin my colleagues.

We often talk about diversity on this site. I have long thought that we would get to truly diverse coverage much faster if we just stuck to one of the tenets many of us learned in journalism schools or at our first jobs: report factually as much as possible and interview with a wide net. But so far in this election, there have been many cases where we haven’t done that. Here are five of the most glaring examples I’ve seen.

• As the results from Iowa came in nearly two weeks ago, I listened as cable anchors and their guests talked of the impact of Barack Obama winning in a mostly white state. Some spoke of how far race relations had evolved. I’m not arguing that there has not been evolvement on the race front, but let’s keep our feet on the planet Earth when reporting about it. Obama won 38 percent of the delegate vote; Edwards won 30 percent; Clinton, Richardson and Biden, combined, won 32 percent. That’s a plurality for Obama, not a majority. That means that most of the delegate votes in this mostly white state did not go to Obama. They went to a white man or a white woman. But none of the anchors or pundits I watched on the night of Iowa’s primary was able to detach themselves from the group hug long enough to point this out.

• I’ve cringed over the references to Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement. (I’ll have much more to say about this in my Tuesday blog, which falls on King’s birthday.)  For now, I’ll suffice it to say that whenever any politician attaches himself/herself to King, compares himself/herself to King or mentions himself/herself in the same sentence as King we should be wary. Outside of reporting about what candidates say, journalists should be very careful about making comparisons between a mission that involved people fighting hoses, dogs and nooses daily, and a political campaign.

• I heard or read several reporters mention Hillary’s tears, but I didn’t see a tear. Many journalists later cleaned it up a bit, saying she became emotional, but that was long after she became known as a crier. Some (including headline writers) went ahead with the crying label because it sounded good, even though it wasn’t accurate.

• Much has already been written about the problems with the polling before the New Hampshire primary. But the important thing for journalists to remember is to not get caught up in the polling no matter which way it’s going. We want to be careful not to call elections weeks before the actual elections are held.

• On a similar subject, we as journalists must be careful to remember to go to the people we are covering not the pundits. It’s sometimes hard to get the pundits out of our heads, but we’ve got to remember to listen to the folks on the corners, in the bars and at the grocery stores. What are they thinking? Do they see and hear the same things that Pat Buchanan, Tim Russert or Clarence Page see and hear?

These are some of my thoughts on elections and fair reporting. Please share yours.

Curtis Lawrence is a journalism professor at Columbia College Chicago.
clawrence@colum.edu