20 Years Later, Struggle Goes On to Reach Promised Land

“I may not get there with you, but our people will get to the Promised Land.” --Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Sitting in the White House Executive Office Building in the spring of 1978, 10 years after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., I was convinced that Martin’s prophecy was on the verge of becoming true.

I was the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and I was sitting at a conference with more than a dozen young White House staff members, all of them black.

I had asked to meet the black staffers, for I wanted them to realize that they were there as a result of the suffering and sacrifice of thousands of people of all races who had led our country to a confrontation with its conscience.

Jimmy Carter was well aware that his march to the presidency as a Southerner would have been impossible without the presence of the black vote and the martyrdom of Martin Luther King Jr. But many of the college-educated young professionals on the White House staff had no such sense of history. They were the black youth who received opportunities in the wake of Martin’s assassination and the Kerner Commission report that foretold the dangers of two Americas, one black and one white.

Truly, some of us did reach the Promised Land of equal opportunity. But for many more the struggle for freedom floundered in a drug-induced slavery, or wandered aimlessly in a wilderness of debt-ridden materialism. The nation seems captive of an economy distorted by needless militarism while suffering from an absence of policy and direction.

The inflation and unemployment of the 1970s produced a level of anxiety in our nation that caused us to turn our back on the Great Society.

But the struggle has continued. It has moved from the streets and court rooms to the city council chambers, state legislatures and the halls of Congress. In spite of apathy from the White House in recent years, the movement has become so strong and secure politically that it has pushed a passive President to proclaim a national holiday in honor of Dr. King, and, however reluctantly, extend the 1965 Voting Rights Act for 25 years.

The nation has only begun to realize how fortunate we were to have nonviolent leadership in the South following World War II. Atlanta could have easily been a Beirut or a Johannesburg, but instead men and women of reason and good will prevailed.

We also might have a completely different world had either King or Robert Kennedy survived the spring and summer of 1968.

We might have avoided the Chicago Democratic convention chaos and we might have avoided the election of Richard Nixon and, as a result, Watergate.

In the absence of strong leaders, we have seen the emergence of a stronger people and we have taken democracy to a new level of participation and activism.

The problems, however, remain. The triple evils of racism, poverty and war continue with us. Legal segregation has almost completely disappeared but the population is only beginning to appreciate the strength and beauty of ethnic and cultural pluralism.

As poverty spreads to growing numbers of whites, the embers of smoldering racism occasionally flare into open conflict. But violent crime, whether across racial lines or within racial communities, is much more derivative of the failure of society to house, educate and employ our citizens.

In spite of new wealth and progress, there is rapid growth in homelessness. Health-care costs limit the medical care available to the poor. And AIDS, cancer, drug abuse and alcoholism continue to destroy the family and community institutions.

Grass-roots democracy without strong leadership creates a danger of chaos. King spoke to us in 1967 about the need to ask the right questions in order to avoid a chaotic future:

“In the days ahead, we must not consider it unpatriotic to raise questions about our national character,” he said. “We must begin to ask why there are 40 million poor people in a nation overflowing with such unbelievable influence? We must begin to ask why has our nation placed itself in the position of being God’s military agent on Earth, and moves to intervene recklessly in Vietnam and in the Dominican Republic? Why have we substituted the arrogant undertaking of policing the whole world, for the high task of setting one’s own house in order?

“All of these questions remind us that there is a need for a radical restructuring of the architecture of American society. For its very survival’s sake, America must re-examine old presuppositions and release itself from many things that for centuries have been held sacred. For the evils of racism, poverty and militarism to die, a new set of values must be born. Our economy must become more person-centered than profit and property-centered. Our government must depend more on its moral power than its military power.”

But to the end, Martin Luther King Jr. remained the apostle of nonviolent social change.

“I must oppose still any attempt to gain our freedom by methods of malice, hate and violence . . . that have characterized oppressions. Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away at its vital unity. It has no boundary lines.”

What would Martin be doing if he were alive today? Would he be President? I doubt it, because for him the world’s highest calling was that of prophet to the nations of the world and pastor to its people.