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Al Roker on MLK and Memphis

After our special edition of TODAY on Friday in Memphis, marking the 40th anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., I sat down with Al Roker to discuss his experience covering the event:DF: When you first got the assignment to go to Memphis, what did you think?Al Roker: My first thought was, this is not going to be a normal kind of remote. It's not going to be, "Hey! What are you doing

April 7, 2008, 2:27 PM UTC

By allDAY

After our special edition of TODAY on Friday in Memphis, marking the 40th anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., I sat down with Al Roker to discuss his experience covering the event:

DF: When you first got the assignment to go to Memphis, what did you think?

Al Roker: My first thought was, this is not going to be a normal kind of remote. It's not going to be, "Hey! What are you doing? Why are you here? Hey, hey!" So at first, I was wondering what we were going to do down here. But as we started to talk it out with our supervising producer on this project, Susan LaSalla, there was stuff we could do, people we could talk to.

To be perfectly honest, my very first thought was, "It's been 40 years?" It doesn't seem like it's been 40 years. Then you start to catalogue things and asking questions: How have we done? How are we doing?

You look at Barack Obama and you go, "Hey, this is great!" You've got an African-American man running for president. And yet, every now and then, race raises its head in this campaign. And then you realize, "Okay...maybe we haven't come so far after all."

You realize that it is still the 800-pound elephant in the room when it comes to this country.

DF: What did you hope to accomplish with the show in Memphis?

Al: To shine a lot on a) this man's great accomplishments and b) to raise the flag that we still have to deal with this. If we're going to achieve our ultimate potential as a nation, we have to recognize everybody's differences, respect the differences, and move forward together. By not talking about it, we're never going to do that.

DF: What stands out to you about Dr. King's life?

Al: He accomplished what he did in a pre-Internet, pre-cable news, pre-talk radio environment. This really was a grassroots effort. There was national media, but it was nowhere close to what it is today. And he was able to do this through word of mouth, through black churches and civil rights-minded people, black and white. It's still a pretty astonishing feat.

DF: And to do it using non-violence as a way to attract media attention--

Al: Right, it was unbelievable. It gives you a sense of -- really, when you listen to those speeches -- of the power of the spoken word. Probably just as many people heard it on the radio as saw it on television. Certainly, in this day and age, he would have been on every news network, cable network and youtube.

In fact, most people never saw it live, they saw Kinescopes of it or films of it.

DF: Anything particularly memorable from the trip to Memphis?

Al: I highly recommend to people to go visit the National Civil Rights Museum. I've been to the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, which is pretty powerful, and this is a pretty powerful experience.

I don't care who you are, whether you're black, white, Hispanic, Asian, you go through the museum, you come away appreciating what went on. And it makes you think about what's going on today.

Actually physically standing there and looking up at the balcony...it's something that you've seen, and it's funny, I never actually thought about it in color. Those black and white pictures of the Lorraine Motel are ingrained in your memory...it's a pretty powerful place.