Fitting Tributes

As the nation today celebrates the second federal holiday in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., there will be marches, parades, church services, banquets and quotes from the great speeches of the civil-rights leader who would have turned 58 this month. But applying King’s principles to current problems would provide the more lasting tribute.

King’s insistence on nonviolence, his most famous and most effective tactic against racial segregation, bears repeating in a nation that is becoming increasingly violent. Murder is the No. 1 killer of black males between the ages of 15 and 24, according to the national Centers for Disease Control. A Boston physician, Dr. Deborah Prothrow-Stith, has developed a high-school curriculum to help students examine the causes and consequences of anger and violence. The curriculum, which is scheduled for schools in 10 U.S. cities, follows King’s dictum.

“How many of you get really angry, angry enough to fight?” asks the doctor, an assistant professor of medicine at Boston City Hospital, during a 10-week course offered at several Boston schools. Then the students talk about the causes of anger, from a need to save face to an indifferent teacher, and they examine responses other than fighting. The doctor who leads the discussion claims no extraordinary early results from the new program, but school officials find fewer fights on campus. And the mere act of trying to defuse anger provides a testament to King’s philosophy.

How would King respond to the drug problem of today?

He would respond with a “campaign of awareness, a new Freedom March,” wrote David T. Lui, a senior at Woodrow Wilson High School, in an essay contest sponsored by the Los Angeles chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference--the organization that King founded 30 years ago. More than 1,100 students responded--youngsters from grades 3 through 12, including two teen-agers who described their personal struggles with the horrors of drugs.

Children born long after King was murdered wrote, among other things, that he wouldn’t wait patiently for a solution to drug abuse, that he would do something now. He wouldn’t point fingers, he would address the causes that drive people to use drugs. He wouldn’t hate, he would teach drug addicts to love themselves.

These may be small demonstrations of the ways in which King’s principles and strategies, which helped to erode the evils of segregation, are kept alive and used to attack current evils. But they add up. And the applications of his compassion, his perseverance, his strengths are fitting tributes on this national holiday and every day.