Martin Luther King on Italian television in the 1960s
The first document consists of a long interview entitled “Un’ora con Martin Luther King” (An hour with Martin Luther King) granted by the black leader to RAI correspondent Ruggero Orlando (1907-1994). explanation of the non-violent strategy. To Orlando’s pressing questions, King responds by search for truth; the rejection of the idea that the end justifies the means; the repulsion towards any 22 April 1966 and offers a lucid illustrating the reasons for peaceful resistance, inspired by five fundamental principles: the continuous form of offence and violence, whether physical or verbal; the ability to recognize in suffering a resource capable of activating processes of social transformation; the belief in progress and improvement as innate ambitions of all human beings.
The second film, “Potere negro” (The power of black people), dates from December 1967. It is a short and touching interview filmed on an airplane by Furio Colombo (1931-2025) during the journey that took Martin Luther King to Birmingham, where he was on his way to serve one of his many sentences for civil disobedience. The Italian journalist Colombo had met King in New York as early as 1960 and had the opportunity to meet him many more times. In the ’67 interview, King returned to the subject of nonviolence and also dwelt on the war in Vietnam, which he considered a further obstacle to the achievement of full civil rights for black Americans (“one must fight for civil rights and against the war at the same time”).
The last televised testimony concerns the news broadcast on 5 April 1968, which announced – in the moving voice of Piero Angela (1928-2022) – the tragic death of the black leader. The memory of
Martin Luther King broadcast in that report was edited by Enzo Biagi. In the studio, Furio Colombo testified his deep sorrow with great emotion, in unequivocal words: “It is a day of mourning and pain that makes us think of the day Kennedy died. But millions of black and young people in America will not emerge from the struggle they have accepted and in which they have engaged. Their struggle will come out more powerful than vile bombings and murders like this one. Or at least that is our hope, at a time of pain for America and the world”.
(We thank the Teche Rai for the kind permission of the footage shown here)
Italian journalists’ investigations into King’s death
Upon King’s death, some of the most experienced and highly regarded journalists from abroad carried out targeted investigations of which intense reports have remained.
Furio Colombo, who was in the United States on the days of the crime, has repeatedly described the site of the murder, where he went a few hours later, scouting out the possible location from which the shots were fired.
Oriana Fallaci left for the United States as soon as she learned of the assassination attempt on King. She travelled to Memphis, then to Atlanta and Washington, gathering impressions and testimonies, describing the “large, angry crowd” that had risen up at the loss of the great leader of hope.
“I arrived in Washington at about seven o’clock in the evening, Saturday 6 April. The airport was in an uproar because it was said that a plane, landing, had been shot at by a black sniper. As if we had been in Saigon, in Da Nang, in Hué. Entering the city with the curfew was something of a feat, passengers were rounded up and sent to nearby motels, the only taxi within miles was that of a black man who did not want white people. I ran to him as one would run to a bunker to escape mortars, explained that I was a foreigner: he accepted me for that. On the windscreen he had written in white paint: ‘Soul Brother’.
Translated literally ‘Soul Brother’ means brother in soul; translated more exactly it means ‘I’m on your side, black man, don’t hurt me’. He explained that without such a sign, the taxi was in danger of being attacked and burnt. White cab drivers, Uncle Tom blacks, certainly do not write ‘Soul Brother’. Once we were in town, he showed me with his finger the cars parked along the pavements: one in ten had ‘Soul Brother’ or ‘Soul Sister’ written on them. There were also ones on the windows of many shops, along the deserted streets barred at every intersection by armed soldiers like in Vietnam. ‘How many soldiers are there tonight?’ I asked him. ‘Ten thousand, sister. But another three thousand five hundred are ready to go into action”
(Oriana Fallaci, 1968. Dal Vietnam al Messico. Diario di un anno cruciale, Milan, Rizzoli, 2017).