Dreaming of a Day That the Color of Dr. King’s Skin No Longer Matters

I watched with keen interest the debate in Riverside County on whether to name its newest high school-- predominantly white--after Martin Luther King Jr. The school board vote for the King name was unanimous, but many parents objected.

Some argued the name might hurt their children’s chances of getting into a good college, and you can only shudder at such ignorance. But most critics were sincere: They preferred a name that more reflected the community.

To me, it points out a discrepancy in this country’s thinking about the slain civil rights champion. Some still see Martin Luther King Jr., assassinated in Memphis, Tenn., in 1968, as a black hero. But reflection of time eventually will prove him to be an American hero, revered by all races. Dr. King’s front-line actions--and his eloquence--helped elevate us to a higher level of understanding about equal rights.

Today is Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. We will officially celebrate it next Monday, part of the American tradition of the three-day holiday weekend.

I’d like to take you back to just one day in Dr. King’s life, April 16, 1963. It was a night in jail that ought to be remembered by every high school history class.

In my own life at that time, I was a high school sophomore in Indiana without a thought to Dr. King or racial discrimination. But two years later, as I became caught up in the civil rights movement of the ‘60s, I came across Dr. King’s “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” from that April night. Its impact has never left me.

By background: Dr. King, based in Atlanta, had joined forces with black church leaders in Birmingham, Ala., in demonstrations against that city’s deeply embedded segregation. Lunch counters, parks, buses, drinking fountains, schools--all were divided by black and white. The notorious police commissioner, Bull Connor, was filling his jail with protesters. Dr. King was arrested after he resisted a state court order blocking him from holding a protest parade.

While in jail, he read in the newspaper about a letter signed by eight local white Christian and Jewish church leaders, calling his march “unwise and untimely.” (A new, less hostile administration in Birmingham was about to take over, forcing Connor out of office.)

Dr. King wrote his 14-page response in the margins of the newspaper, on toilet paper and on scraps of paper smuggled into him. It states in part:

“I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. . . . I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. . . .

“You deplore the demonstrations. But I am sorry that your statement did not express a similar concern for the conditions that brought the demonstrations into being. . . . Birmingham is probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States. . . .

“We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor, it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have never yet engaged in a direct action movement that was ‘well timed.’ For years now I have heard the word ‘Wait!’ It rings in the ear of every Negro with a piercing familiarity. . . . We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights.

“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Council or the Ku Klux Klan, but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice . . . who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom. . . . Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

“We who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to surface the hidden tension that is already alive.”

He went on to write that he was forced into civil disobedience because the court order directed at his movement upholds a segregation that “distorts the soul. . . . It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority.”

And a final passage from Dr. King’s letter, one I can still remember with chills from first reading it more than 30 years ago:

“One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for the best in the American dream and the most sacred values in our Judeo-Christian heritage--carrying our whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers.”

I would be proud for my children to attend a school named after someone who stood on the front lines behind that message. I hope someday those parents in Riverside who opposed naming the school after Dr. King will feel that way too.

Wrap-Up: Wednesday I got a chance to take a tour of Orange County’s own elementary school named after Martin Luther King Jr., which opened last school year. The first thing you see is a huge outdoor mural called “The Dream Continues,” depicting Dr. King, two American astronauts and migrant farm workers leader Cesar Chavez. It was the principal, Frances Byfield, who asked that it be commissioned. It was created by art teacher Sheila Goldberg of Serrano Elementary in Santa Ana.

This week at the Martin Luther King Jr. school (which is nearly 90% Latino) the students are studying issues related to his life. In the fourth-grade class I visited, the teacher, Leolani Cooper, had written words on the blackboard for the students to discuss, such as: prejudice, injustice, segregation.

Dr. King’s birthday today kicks off the Santa Ana school’s three-month studies of world leaders and different cultures that it’s calling “season of nonviolence.” The program outline I saw is capped by a quote from Mahatma Gandhi: “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” And another from Dr. King: “Only love has the power to make an enemy a friend.”

Pretty good sentiments for youngsters of any school, whether Riverside or Orange counties.

Jerry Hicks’ column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Readers may reach Hicks by calling the Times Orange County Edition at (714) 966-7823 or by fax to (714) 966-7711, or e-mail to jerry.hicks@latimes.com