Advise and Consent.
The Otto Preminger film originally cast Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the role of a Georgia Senator by the name of “Senator King.” King was to have appeared in a short role at the height of the movie during a staged Senate vote, but he later backed out of it, saying that he didn’t see anything in this role in the film that would “advance the cause of civil rights.”
To be sure, Dr. King had bigger fish to fry at the time: It was the Year of the Freedom Riders, and his goal in life apparently was NOT to become an overnight sensation and movie star.
To mischaracterize Dr. King as a sensation-seeker who lived for attention, fame, glory, and to be to others as “Jesus walking on water” appears to be anything BUT the truth.
If we can say anything else about his true legacy, he was a working man’s man. If we paid closer attention to what was said about him when he was ALIVE rather than the glorification of his martyred image AFTER he was assassinated, we would know that and acknowledge it rather than keep talking about how much we hate “resurrecting” him and throwing him out of his resting place every year around this time.
Dr. King’s $5,000 “appearance fee” was to be made payable to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (‘SCLC’). However, Dr. King did acknowledge that he had some constituents who thought it would be a positive influence for him to appear, especially since it took all the way from the 1880s to 1966 for another Black Senator to be elected to Congress in America.NOTE: The SCLC was an AFRICAN AMERICAN organization dedicated to the rights of NEGROES from the perspective of the CHURCHED, and ‘multiculturalism’ was only meant in the context of Blacks who were treated as subhuman during that time, as in I AM A MAN. That “Negro initiative” on Black cultural advancement has still not been completely realized in 2016 America. We cannot continue to get “dewy-eyed” about a King Legacy on some “all-nations multiculturalism” that didn’t happen when he was alive.
Not even King’s children, around the same age I was when his life was taken at so very young an age, or his other living relatives can say TRULY what he “may have” evolved into later in life, because he didn’t get to live to tell us. Yes, at the time, it was ALL about Black folks and how he could get all of us working together to make life better in the nation and around the world. Surely, white supremacy and the rights of white nationalists, and even the right of gays to legally marry, would NEVER have done that cause any justice — just as this Preminger film would not have done Civil Rights any justice during that time.
He (Dr. King) declined to accept the small bit part in Preminger’s film and noted that he had never signed an agreement or made a verbal agreement to appear in the film “Advise and Consent,” so Preminger let it go and moved on to other things.
Nowadays, “The Preachers of Hollywood” could stand to learn yet ANOTHER lesson from Dr. King’s righteously “resurrected” image this Black History Year: Your belief in God becomes dubious when it is so easy to sell your spirit and soul out for a bag of silver shillings.
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