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Dr. MARTIN LUTHER KING Jr. - The Dreamer |
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Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. - The Dreamer - He Dared to Dream |
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FOR THE REV. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR., DEATH AT the hands of a white bigot came as a tragic finale to an American drama fraught with classic hints of inevitability. Propelled to fame in the throes of the U.S. blacks' mid-century revolution, he gave it momentum, steered it toward nonviolence and served as its eloquent voice. Yet the movement he served with such power and zeal was beginning to pass him by even before his death. Nonviolence was beginning to seem outmoded to the increasingly militant black community. Behind his back, King's black denigrators called him "de Lawd"; in public they called him an Uncle Tom. And in the years since he was gunned down on the balcony of a Memphis motel in March 1968, both his achievements and his personal character have been assailed.
Yet if ever there were a transcendent symbol of the dreams, hopes and achievements of African Americans, it was Martin Luther King. Bridging the void between black despair and white unconcern, he spoke so powerfully ofand from, the wretchedness of his people's condition that he became the moral guidon of civil rights, not only to Americans but also to the world beyond. The courage and eloquence that brought him TIME'S designation as its Man of the Year for 1963 and the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1964 have endured. His legacy as America's foremost spokesman for civil rights in this century is secure.
Born in 1929 to a middle-class Georgia family active for two generations in the civil rights cause, he was the sec- and child and first-born son, named after his father, Michael Luther King.
The elder King, pastor of Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church, changed both their names when Martin was five to honor the Reformation rebel who nailed his independent declaration to the Castle Church. The small cruelties of bigotry left their scars despite King's warm, protective family life. As an adult, he still recalled the curtains that were used on the dining cars of trains to separate white from black. "I was very young when I had my first experience in sitting behind the curtain," he says. "I felt just as if a curtain had come down across my whole life. The insult of it I will never forget:' A bright student, he zipped through high school, entered Atlanta's black Morehouse College at 15 and searched for "some intellectual basis for social philosophy." Thoreau's essay "Civil Disobedience" showed him the goal, and King picked the ministry as a proper means to achieve it. At Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, he discovered the writings of Mohandas Gandhi, whose faith in nonviolent protest and doctrine of satyagraha, "soul force"-became King's lodestar.
Moving on to Boston University, King gained a doctorate and a bride, Antioch College graduate Coretta Scott, and in 1954 he took his first pastorate in Montgomery, Alabama. There, late in 1955, a seamstress's tired feet precipitated the first great civil rights test of the South's white power structure and launched King's galvanic career. Mrs. Rosa Parks' arrest for refusing to give her seat on a town bus to a white man ended 382 days later with the capitulation of the Montgomery bus line to a comprehensive Negro consortium and the U.S. Supreme Court. King, too new to Montgomery to have enemies in the usually fragmented Negro community, became its chief. His leadership was more inspirational than administrative, but it was marked by profound courage. One night a dynamite bomb was tossed onto his front porch while he spoke at a rally; he returned home and faced down a mob of enraged blacks, eager for revenge: "We believe in law and order. We are not advocating violence. We want to love our enemies." The crowd dispersed, and a white policeman who was present later said, "I owe my life to that nigger preacher."
The initial triumph in Montgomery annealed King's philosophy. When the following years brought sit-ins and freedom rides, King was there with organizational support. He formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and midwifed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, two of the most effective agents of civil rights change in the 1960s.
Battle in Birmingham. King's horizon grew, and with it his clout. In 1963 he marched into Birmingham, tactically prepared, and flayed that citadel of Dixie bigotry on national television. Public Safety Commissioner Theophilus ("Bull") Connor became the white villain for King's black heroes. Day after day, men, women and children in their Sunday best paraded cheerfully downtown to be hauled off to jail for demonstrating. Connor arrested them at lunch counters and in the streets, wherever they gathered. Still they came, rank on rank. At length, on Tuesday, May 7, 2,500 blacks poured out of church, surged through the police lines and swarmed downtown. Armed with clubs, cops beat their way into the crowds. An armored car bulldozed the milling throngs, while fire hoses swept them down the streets. King had created a crisis, and Connor had made it a success. The whole world was watching-and the spectacle brought aroused whites flocking to the civil rights movement in a stream that continued to grow until black victories began to dam its flow. "The civil rights movement:' said President Kennedy in a later meeting with King, "owes Bull Connor as much as it owes Abraham Lincoln:'
By now, King was swamped with speaking engagements. One of the century's great orators, he married the cadences of classic Southern Baptist preaching with the democratic idealism of Jefferson and Lincoln and marshaled his memorable phrases as his most powerful weapons in his war against prejudice. He reached his peak as a public speaker with his unforgettable peroration at the Lincoln Memorial at the March on Washington in August 1963: "I have a dream!" he cried, and it seemed the dream was becoming a reality, so powerfully did he evoke its contours.
Although 1965 marked the enactment of voting rights by the U.S. Congress and another successful civil rights campaign-this time in Selma, Alabama-it also brought the deadly rioting in Watts, the black ghetto in Los Angeles. To many blacks, the pace of gain was too slow and too meager: like Gandhi before him, King was outpaced by the expectations he had helped unleash. He went north, turning his battle toward economic issues in New York City, Cleveland and Chicago.
More and more, King diffused his aims. He inveighed against the Vietnam War, saying it hamstrung the civil rights drive and President Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty. Calling at one point for a $4,000-a-year guaranteed family income in the U.S., he threatened national boycotts and spoke of disrupting entire cities by nonviolent camp-ins. His newly emphasized goals: "Economic security; decent, sanitary housing; a quality education."
In his lifetime King was deified by his admirers, demonized by his enemies. If something of a saint, he was also a sinner: FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover actually taped episodes of his marital infidelities to blackmail him, and in 1990 scholars charged he had plagiarized sections of his doctoral thesis.
Death in Memphis. In the spring of 1968, King threw himself into a minor labor dispute in Memphis, where 1,300 predominantly black garbage collectors were striking for higher pay. Ironically, when blacks rioted during his first march, King felt that his nonviolent philosophy had been besmirched, and he wanted to withdraw. Only at the urging of his aides did he consent to return.
When he came back to Memphis, he found a different sort of challenge. Some newspapers had emphasized during his absence that the prophet of the poor had been staying at the luxurious Rivermont, a Holiday Inn that charged the then grand sum of $29 a night for a suite. To repair his image, King checked into the black-owned Lorraine, a nondescript, two-story cinderblock structure near Memphis' renowned Beale Street, where he and his entourage paid $13 a night for their green-walled, rust-spotted rooms. On April 4, when King walked out of Room 306 onto the second floor balcony of the Lorraine to take the evening air, he was shot through the neck by a heavy-caliber bullet fired from the rooming house across the street. He was pronounced dead within an hour-at age 39. His assassin, James Earl Ray, a white supremacist, was apprehended and sentenced to 99 years in prison.
Throughout King's oratory ran a dark premonition that he would be slain. And with reason. By 1964 his home had been bombed three times and he had been jailed 14 times. In Harlem in 1958, a deranged black woman stabbed him dangerously near the heart. He had been pummeled and punished by white bullies in many parts of the South. In simmering Philadelphia, Mississippi, he had declared, "Before I will be a slave, I will be dead in my grave." That epitaph hardly symbolizes what King stood for: life and love-not death and despair.
King flung luminous words into the face of white America: "We will match your capacity to inflict suffering with our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force. We will not hate you, but we can not in all good conscience obey your unjust laws. We will soon wear you down by our capacity to suffer. And in winning our freedom, we will so appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process" In his death, as in his life, Martin Luther King-eyes on the prize-moved all Americans a long way toward that goal.
Excerpts from TIME Great People of the 20th Century © 1996 Time Inc. Home Entertainment |
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