Brando continued to watch the news reports, including reports that featured Dr. King's last speech, the night before. The actor takes the time to paraphrase the ending of the speech we've heard so often in these years since:
I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land"
King was shot the next day, Brando said. "I thought somehow this has got to matters. And if we don't all as citizens do something that is a person-to-person contribution, I don't think that we're really going to have a place to come home to, if we do get jobs."
Brando said he thought about making his "time, energy, and money" fully available "to do whatever I can as an individual to rectify the situation we're in."
Johnny Carson offers an observation rarely heard on cable networks, let alone a "talk" showan observation we, nonetheless, have been all-too familiar with. Maybe with Dr. King's death, people will realize the "terrible" deed and things will change. Or maybe what is made conscious to all in that moment is what was to die with Dr. King. So, "maybe things won't change." (And this was late night television! How far have we fallen!).
"I don't think they will, Johnny."
Brando continues: "I think that nothing is really going to change unless I do it. Unless the trombone player does it. Unless the guy sitting in front of his television with a beer can does something about it."
He cites a "conservative" panel, appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, assigned the task of finding out why Black people "can't get off their knees." The panel publishes a book, states Brando, pointing to the way white Americans "feels" or understands or responds to the presence of Black Americans.
There you have it, Brando said. The study "points to racism and discrimination in its most subtle forms and its most cruel and blatant forms." He doubts, he adds, if one out of one hundred thousand Americans ever read the study, available as a paperback.
"It isn't enough to talk. It isn't enough to shake our fingers. We have to do something. We have to give up our money. We have to give of our time. We have to give our hearts. Now that King is dead, many people are thinking of the violence to come.
Brando said he spoke with Walter Reuther (labor organizer and justice activist), and the two talked about the one last chance "white people" have to turn things around in this country. And "if we don't do it soon and if we don't do it massively," then expect amageddon. It's going to be guns, thousands of people killed, Brando stated, and it will be internment camps. "We would have reduced ourselves as a nation and as a people."
Brando continues, "the only thing I could think of was to try and get a program where people would contribute no less than 1% of their entire year's earnings to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which was King's organization, to further his philosophy, to further his works, to carry on his good works, in the name of non-violence and with the help of his beautiful wife, Mrs. King."
Brando stated that he fear Black Americans were losing faith in white Americans ever treating them "equally and fairly." Time is running out, he adds, and "I dread to think what's going to happen."
Again the host, Carson, offers an insight most Americans still refuse to acknowledge today. Yet, then, in 1968, Carson acknowledges what Americans refused to accept. "The more the other person benefits economically and socially, the more everyone benefits." It benefits everyone. The more you help someone else, Carson said, the more you are helped.
Reuther, Brando said, agreed. It cost more money, said the labor leadership, to keep Blacks in the position they are inat the bottom economically and sociallythan it would to bring everyone up.
And Brando need not have witnessed the last four years, ten years, twenty. He notes what happens when people are lied to, when people have become "tired of being sick and tired." "If we do nothing, people will become angrier and angrier." Tension will follow frustration, and violence erupts. Black people are promised help and receive none. White Americans, in the meantime, withdraw. What remains in the center: "people with guns."
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