
An Hour With Martin Luther King Jr.: David Susskind Meets MLK
On June 9, 1963, television host David Susskind sat down with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for an hour-long, unscripted conversation broadcast on WPIX-TV New York, recently restored by the Paley Center. The camera holds mostly on the two men talking, no reenactments or music, just King answering questions about the Civil Rights Movement as it stood that spring, weeks after the Birmingham campaign and the images of police dogs and fire hoses that had just shocked the country. Susskind presses him on strategy, on nonviolence as a tactic versus a conviction, and on where the movement goes next, and King lays out his thinking in his own words, unfiltered by later hagiography. There is no narrator here and no argument being built for you; the interview is the document. For anyone used to King only through speech highlights, this is ninety-plus minutes of him thinking out loud in real time, in the middle of events whose ending he did not yet know.