Dr. King’s Legacy : Black Gains Became New Status Quo

The night before he died, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. brooded alone in the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, while outside the wind whipped a stinging rain and the city was under a tornado alert.

At Mason Temple, a rally in support of striking garbage workers was under way, but King, feeling gloomy and introspective as he often had in the late winter and early spring of 1968, had sent his ever-present side man, Ralph David Abernathy, to speak in his place.

About 8:30, after King had already gotten into his pajamas, an excited Abernathy called from the temple. A huge crowd had turned out, in spite of the miserable weather. They wanted to hear their leader, not his alter ego. King was in no mood to preach, but Abernathy was insistent, so he dressed and drove through the battering storm to deliver a sermon that would haunt those who heard it for the rest of their days--a sermon that seemed to foreshadow his death and yet to see beyond it.

A Call for Independence

The stirring Memphis sermon was at once King’s epitaph and a new, still unfulfilled Declaration of Independence for black America. Less than 24 hours after he delivered it, the leader of a civil rights revolution unparalleled in American history was shot in ambush by a small-time punk named James Earl Ray who hid in a flophouse with a hunting rifle.

On April 4, it will have been 20 years--a full generation--since the assassination of the man now mentioned in the same breath with Franklin Delano Roosevelt as among the most influential public figures of 20th-Century America.

“He resurrected a society,” said Washington lawyer Charles Morgan, the first white man to serve as a director of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. “No one else did that. No one except Roosevelt.

“King made every day election day in America. He forced American citizens to watch. He forced the Congress to act. The courts responded properly, and together they vindicated the Constitution of the United States.”

Unlike Roosevelt, King accepted his leadership reluctantly and worked profound change without the tools and authority of government behind him. The Establishment, in fact, stood in his way as firmly as the racists who met him in the streets.

“His legacy,” said Georgetown University law professor Eleanor Holmes Norton, “is much larger than an opening up of the American political process. He addressed the much deeper malady of racism.

“We had lived with racism for our entire history. It is our oldest social scourge, and he made the country think about it.”

The sermon in Memphis seemed at the time a message at once foreboding and strangely filled with hope, coming as it did at a moment when King’s leadership and credibility were being challenged as they seldom had during his 12 years as the nation’s most visible leader of mass protest against racial discrimination.

Only days before, King had led a garbage workers’ march that had ended in rioting. He was back in Memphis to march again--to remove that onus of violence as much as to help the striking garbage men.

As thunder rolled over Memphis and the rain beat against the windows of the Mason Temple that night, King turned from the plight of the garbage workers to a startling subject: his own death. He recounted how he had been stabbed in New York, the knife blade reaching so near his heart that a sneeze would have killed him, and how, that very morning, his departure from Atlanta had been delayed by a bomb scare aboard the plane.

None of those things mattered any longer, he said, for he had seen the Promised Land.

Crowd Moved to Tears

His voice rose and wavered and paused for ecstatic crescendos of “Oh, yes!” “Yes, Sir!” and “Preach it, Doctor!” In the crowd, eyes flooded with tears and hundreds of voices punctuated the preacher’s rolling cadence, urging him on at the end of every sentence.

“I don’t know what will happen now,” he said. “We’ve got some difficult days ahead, but it really doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen. And I’ve seen the Promised Land.

“And 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. So I’m happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

“I have a dream this afternoon that the brotherhood of man will become a reality. With this faith, I will go out and carve a tunnel of hope from a mountain of despair . . . .

“With this faith, we will be able to achieve this new day, when all of God’s children--black men, white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics--will be able to join hands and sing with the Negroes in the spiritual of old: ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God almighty, we are free at last!’ ”

Nowhere are the inextricable legacies of Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s as dramatic as in the Deep South, where race consciousness was, and is, a part of existence, and blacks and whites are at once isolated and intimate.

Racial segregation in public accommodations has disappeared in the old Confederacy.

Southern blacks sit on the very courts, city councils and school boards that rigidly imposed inferior status upon them a generation ago. They hold middle-class jobs long reserved for whites only and attend the most integrated school systems in America, the public schools below the Mason-Dixon Line.

And in the North, 20 years after King’s murder set off black rioting in dozens of American cities, blacks have joined whites living in the suburbs, comfortably out of touch with the intractable misery of the inner-city ghetto.

Today the civil rights movement is no longer a movement at all. It is a fact that, for many, casts a painfully ironic shadow over King’s legacy.

‘Something Missing’

“Something is missing,” said Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), a black activist who took part in the student sit-ins at Southern lunch counters, helped organize the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and marched with King from Selma to Montgomery in Alabama. “It has been missing ever since his assassination--a sense of moral clarity, moral authority, urgency.

“Today, we are caught up in getting our piece of the pie. We no longer speak in moral terms. We don’t ask what we can do to help the total society, that large segment of society that is still left behind. Without Dr. King, that force is missing. That direction is missing.”

There is an alarming view that nothing remains to be done, Prof. Gary Orfield of the University of Chicago told a seminar on blacks and the Constitution at the Smithsonian Institution several days ago.

It is, he said, an impression “that civil rights used to be a problem, that it was solved in the 1960s, and that now all we have to do is deal with some economic issues. This is preposterous if you look at the incredible level of segregation in housing and schools, the diminishing access to college and jobs, but that is what most people believe.”

In Alabama, where King rose to prominence as the leader of the Montgomery bus boycott in 1956, 448 blacks today hold public elective offices, more than in any other state except Mississippi.

George C. Wallace, who became governor with a cry of “Segregation forever!” and dominated the state’s politics for a generation, long ago recanted and tried to make his peace with Alabama blacks, who now have five senators and 19 representatives in the state Legislature.

The self-styled “Cradle of the Confederacy” today has two political organizations that can legitimately be called “machines.” Both of them are controlled by blacks. One of them is Richard Arrington, the mayor of Birmingham, a city made notorious for bombings of black churches and Police Chief Eugene (Bull) Conner’s attack on King’s demonstrators with fire hoses and snarling dogs.

Across the Deep South, the political calculus is similar.

Where They Are Today

Andrew Young, King’s long-time lieutenant in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, is mayor of Atlanta and contemplating running for governor in 1990.

John Lewis, an organizer of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee who broke with the SNCC to join King’s Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march, is one of 23 blacks in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Growing up at Brundidge, Ala., 50 miles from Montgomery, Lewis listened to radio broadcasts of King’s sermons from the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.

After graduation from high school, he took a bus to Montgomery to talk with King, Abernathy and Fred Gray, the lawyer for the Montgomery Improvement Assn., about entering nearby and then all-white Troy State Teachers’ College. The civil rights leaders were ready to support him, but Lewis’ parents had nine other children and were making payments on a small farm.

“All the arrangements were made to file suit against the State Board of Education and Troy State,” Lewis recalled recently, “but my parents were so afraid of what could happen, we dropped it.”

Gives Credit to King

Last year, not long after he was elected to Congress, Lewis went back to Brundidge and there was a parade for him, led by the Troy State University band. A sign marking “John Lewis Street” was unveiled.

“Martin Luther King Jr.,” the Georgia Democrat said, “made that possible.”

The most potent instrument in the political transformation of the South was the 1964 Voting Rights Act. Enacted in the aftermath of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination and under excruciating pressure from civil rights demonstrations, it brought hundreds of thousands of blacks to the polls that had been closed to them.

By the end of last year, the country counted 6,681 blacks in elective offices. Among them were mayors of 34 cities with populations of more than 50,000, including Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles and Philadelphia.

The political revolution has gone on despite early efforts in states such as Mississippi to dilute the impact of massive black voting.

Two years ago, Rep. Mike Espy (D-Miss.) became the first black member of Congress from a rural area. His district takes in much of the Mississippi Delta, where the black majority had been politically powerless before the civil rights movement.

New Political Reality

The new political reality--and the intransigent racism--in Mississippi was cryptically acknowledged by Ross Barnett, the segregationist governor of the early 1960s, not long after passage of the voting rights law.

In Philadelphia, Miss., for the autumn stump speaking at the Neshoba County Fair, he was greeted by a longtime admirer who was looking forward to an anti-Washington diatribe embellished with racial innuendo.

“Are you gonna talk about the niggers this year?” Barnett was asked.

“No, no, I can’t,” he replied. “Ross Junior’s got too many of ‘em in his district.”

Politically, however, there is less than meets the eye in the changes in Dixie--and in the rest of the country.

Milton Morris, research director of the Joint Center for Political Studies, surveyed the results of the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s triumph in the Super Tuesday primaries March 8 and declared them “good news and bad news.”

“The good news,” he said, “is the extent of the mobilization of the black electorate in the South. The bad news is that the races are as polarized as much as they have been at any time in the last two decades. What you have is a white electorate and a black electorate, and they are not crossing very much.

Blacks Electing Blacks

“If you look at the 6,600 black elected officials in the country, the overwhelming majority of them are elected by black voters. What we have very often is not a non-racial electorate, but a highly racial cleavage.”

David Garrow, the political scientist who received the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for his biography of King, “Bearing the Cross,” contends that the fundamental legacy of the civil rights movement is something more important even than the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act.

“It is really the degree to which, over 20 to 25 years, overt discrimination and racism have been put beyond the pale in the normal daily course of human interactions and events,” he said. “It is a change in what our society deems acceptable and not acceptable.”

Although the civil rights movement has produced a new South without the dehumanizing discrimination once sanctioned by the state, the political revolution has not led to the new economic day that whites feared and blacks expected.

The Young Cannot Remember

The generation that has grown up in the South since King’s assassination--black and white--has strikingly different perceptions from its parents, who were young adults when King led his massively publicized marches.

Said J. Mills Thornton, a University of Michigan historian who was a teen-ager in Montgomery at the time of the bus boycott:

“Because they have never experienced the old discrimination, young blacks have a hard time believing that there has been any change at all. Young whites refuse to believe what it was like. They don’t believe there is discrimination now, and they perceive black demands as special pleadings for unfair advantage.”

When he arrived in Memphis in the spring of 1968, King was at a crossroads. He had long since moved beyond the issues of desegregation and voting rights.

For more than a year, he had been an outspoken opponent of the war in Vietnam. That contributed significantly to the rising respectability of the mass protests against U.S. policy in Southeast Asia, but it also aroused criticism from black leaders who thought he was moving far afield from the civil rights agenda.

Ahead of him was a poor peoples’ march on Washington. Preparations for it had not gone well. Important figures in the civil rights movement were concerned that it would lead to violence. David Lewis, an early King biographer and now the Martin Luther King professor of history at Rutgers University, believes that by the time he was killed, King had already decided to scrap the poor peoples’ campaign.

He was more controversial than ever. His methods were mistrusted even by whites who sympathized with black grievances. His philosophy of nonviolence was being challenged by militant young blacks and his own more confrontational tactics were being criticized by prominent elders of the civil rights movement.

Balance on Militancy

Back in Montgomery, he had defined his objective as being “militant enough to keep my people aroused to positive action and yet moderate enough to keep this fervor within controllable Christian bounds.”

Along the way, in Garrow’s view, King’s nonviolent persuasion had evolved into nonviolent coercion, experience teaching that “nonviolence, coupled with violent opponents, would best serve the movement in its effort to gain active support from the American populace.”

To his critics, King’s embracing of new issues beyond segregation and overt discrimination smacked of opportunism. But those who had long been a part of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference saw all of King’s work as wrapped up in a philosophy formed early in the movement.

“He was never just basic civil rights,” said Andrew Young, the Atlanta mayor and former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. “His agenda was always racism, poverty and war. They were, in his mind, inextricably bound.”

Because of that, Young said, King’s influence was manifested in the Jimmy Carter Administration’s emphasis on human rights in its foreign policy, in the Lyndon B. Johnson Administration’s War on Poverty and in today’s rising consciousness of the homeless.

Twenty years after his death, the images of King as a preacher and protester--his “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and his haunting “Free at Last” refrain in Memphis--are his most enduring, but there is also another, keener image of him as a political and social philosopher.

“He was ahead of his time in his understanding of the cultural and racial implications of the anti-war movement,” said Raymond Arsenault, a University of South Florida professor who is writing a book on the Montgomery bus boycott. “He was far ahead of his time in understanding the economic aspects of discrimination. He has been sold short as a political thinker and theorist.

“If he were living today, he would be leading people in the streets for economic justice, taking to the streets and disrupting. People are still afraid of that today.”

Priorities Were Changing

At the time King died, Jack O’Dell of the National Rainbow Coalition said at the recent Smithsonian seminar, he had crossed a divide and was elevating his sights from civil rights to civil equality.

“That is where Martin left us in 1968,” he said. “Today, the struggle is not for equality before the law and to clean up the remnants of injustice, but to establish equality in our standing in the life and political economy of this country.

“Civil equality would mean if we have 11% of the U.S. population, we would have 11%, at least, of the national income, . . . 47 congresspersons, not 23, and 11 U.S. senators, not zero.

“Civil equality would mean that we would be as prominent in the government structure, in television and radio corporations and major banks and academic institutions as we are among workers in the cafeteria. . . . We would be 11% of the poor, if poor is considered a status, not 25% of all the poor.”

At the height of the marching, protesting days of the civil rights movement, when Southern blacks and their liberal allies from the North filled Southern jails, King’s critics found fault with him for not going to jail often enough, for picking his spots too carefully. Black power militants thought that time had passed “Doc” by, that it was too late for his nonviolence, his religiosity, his outreach to whites.

At battlegrounds such as Birmingham, whites bitterly accused him of seeking publicity and making trouble in places where problems were being quietly resolved.

Among those who cringed at King’s arrival in Birmingham in 1964 was John Buchanan, a white Baptist minister and racial moderate who had worked to maintain racial peace in the wake of the church bombings and sought to integrate parks, which had become the focal point of black protest.

At the time Buchanan, who was elected to Congress a short time later, felt that King was only “using us as a national stage,” provoking a crisis where one could have been avoided.

Racial War Loomed

From the perspective of a quarter century, Buchanan now believes that King perhaps prevented racial warfare in the South. “There was every reason for rage in the black community,” he said. “There were large numbers of white racists. It is entirely possible that we were headed for racial warfare.”

He now places King among “the truly important people of American history, a symbol and a catalyst, a man who brought paper promises to reality in Black America.

“He led us toward the fulfillment of our best dreams, toward becoming a truly just society. It is unfinished business, but when I go back home to Birmingham and see black Americans in professional positions, it is thrilling because it is so different from the days when college graduates were waiting on tables.”

Yet the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. carries with it an element of uneasiness.

In the view of many scholars, his martyrdom, his Nobel Peace Prize, the national holiday honoring his birth, the personal legend that grows with passing time--all these diminish the importance of uncounted other individuals who fought with no less commitment for the cause of civil rights.

Man and Myth

The real Martin Luther King Jr., moody, often self-doubting and a womanizer, has been lost to a larger-than-life image that threatens to eclipse the movement he led.

Garrow argues that the struggle for civil rights in dusty communities far from King’s marches and the national media spotlight remain the great untold story of the civil rights movement.

In the hero-worshiping of King, said Clayborne Carson of Stanford University, there is an implicit suggestion that without him the civil rights movement would not have happened.

“That is historically erroneous,” he said. “The Montgomery bus boycott would have happened, the Voting Rights Act would have happened. It is important to keep that in mind when we start to see why the civil rights movement declined. It would have declined even had King lived.”

In an article in the Journal of American History, Carson wrote that the enormous emphasis on King’s charismatic leadership “conveys the misleading notion of a movement held together by spellbinding speeches and blind faith rather than by a complex blend of rational and emotional bonds.

“King’s charisma did not place him above criticism. Indeed, he was never able to gain mass support for his notion of nonviolent struggle as a way of life, rather than simply a tactic.”

And were he alive, Carson added, “he would give scant comfort to those who condition their activism upon the appearance of another King, for he recognized the extent to which he was a product of the movement that called him to leadership.”

Demurrers from scholars notwithstanding, the legend grows larger. Controversy stalks efforts to separate King’s legacy from the legacy of the movement, to explore whether he was the movement’s creator or its product.

Yet in churches where King summoned people to cast their fears aside, the believers accept that King was chosen to do what he did.

“I happen to believe,” said John Lewis, “that Martin Luther King Jr. was selected, ordained by some force to come along at a particular time in history and make this contribution.”

It is a view that is popular at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where King grew up, and among blacks in the city where his birthplace is now a shrine.

“The movement has been empowered by his martyrdom,” said his friend Andrew Young. “In a sense he has been more powerful in death than he was even in life.”