E-Mail This Article to a Friend Broken dream The American Experience celebrates MLK Day with Citizen King BY GERALD PEARY

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would have turned 75 this Monday if he’d been an ordinary minister without the Gandhi-like calling to integrate racist America via the potent weapon of non-violence. "History has seized me," King explained in the early ’60s, as he became a peripatetic foot soldier in the battle to "break down the walls of segregation" and to bring his "Negro" people "to the promised land." PBS’s The American Experience has chosen to honor the 75th birthday with Citizen King, a 90-minute documentary produced by Orlando Bagwell (Malcolm X: Make It Plain) and Noland Walker (Africans in America: America’s Journey Through Slavery) that will screen here in Boston on January 19 and 23 on WGBH 2/Channel 44.

Eyes on the Prize it isn’t. A decision to restrict Citizen King to the civil-rights leader’s final five years, 1963-1968, has created havoc for the filmmakers and confusion for the viewer, especially in the first act of this non-fiction drama. When Citizen King jumps, near the start, into King’s 1963 journey to Birmingham, Alabama, you’re apt to feel you’ve walked into the middle of the program. There’s a sketchy explanation of the issues in Birmingham, no explanation of the city of Birmingham, and no explanation of King’s organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Why does King go to prison in Birmingham? How is he victorious? Without a context, the few sentences given of his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" make no sense. That’s unfortunate: this is one of the most stirring, brilliant pieces of political and spiritual oratory ever.

We’re also plunged into the 1963 March on Washington, where King’s mythic "I Had a Dream" speech is no more illuminated than when we hear bits of it in an overview 1960s documentary. Dr. King is introduced in Washington as "the moral leader of our nation," but you can’t feel that in the haphazard first half-hour of Citizen King. If you admire and love the Nobel Peace Prize winner, it’s from the knowledge you bring to the documentary.

Fortunately, Citizen King slows down, finds its story, and eventually humanizes its main character. That’s at the time, 1965-1968, when King’s victories come hard, if at all, as he moves his integrationist campaign from the South to the West, after the Watts riots, and to Mayor Daley’s Chicago, where he’s met by violent, animalistic white-supremacists during a march on suburban Cicero. For the first time, King is challenged within his own community, by those calling for a more vigilant, fist-in-the-air response to white rule. Citizen King really comes alive with rarely seen footage of a 1966 march through Mississippi in which King is challenged at every turn by an emerging and far more militant leader of color: Stokely Carmichael, future Black Panther. It was during that march that Carmichael first utilized in public the incendiary term "Black Power." King resisted any deviance from turn-the-other-cheek non-violence. Yet by the end of the unhappy Mississippi stay (King: "Mississippi is still evil, the worst state in the union"), he was using Carmichael’s word "black" as often as the "Negro" he had grown up with.

Citizen King is flushed out with present-day, talking-heads interviews with those, African-American and white, who were there in the 1960s. The most glaring missing witnesses: Coretta King and Jesse Jackson. The most useful person doing the remembering: Andrew Young, who was with King in Miscopy, in Washington, on all the marches, and at the fatal end, in Memphis, where they’d come to support a unionizing drive by dirt-poor trash collectors. A weary King managed an eloquent speech: "All labor has dignity. . . . It is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and get starvation wages."

Young gives a vivid description of King’s last hour on earth: they had a boy-like pillow fight in Young’s room, at a Memphis motel. King went outside, toward his room, to dress for dinner. A shot was heard; Young thought it was a firecracker. Dr. Martin Luther King’s legacy? In addition to his monumental civil-rights work, he was an early and courageous opponent of the war in Vietnam. And we can be grateful to the filmmakers of Citizen King for uncovering a King speech that should be brought back as an anti-imperialist anthem in the Bush era: "It seems I can hear God say to America, ‘You are too arrogant, and if you don’t change your ways, I’ll break the backbone of your power.’ "

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com