King Had a Dream; It’s Not Yet Realized

No one person, not even the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., fueled an entire nation’s capacity to hope for racial harmony.

Yet if he did not create it, somehow King embodied the spirit of his time. Peace and love, nonviolence and righteous revolution--mass movements demanding that America live up to the noble ideals of its birth or once and for all declare them meaningless blather.

“Ever since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, America has manifested a schizophrenic personality on the question of race,” King wrote in “Stride Toward Freedom.” “She has been torn between selves--a self in which she has proudly professed democracy and a self in which she has sadly practiced the antithesis of democracy.”

It was the struggle in the South to end segregation, the Jim Crow laws that enforced apartheid between blacks and whites, that captured the country’s attention and catapulted King to national stature. From then on, his life would entail a succession of demonstrations, incarcerations, marches and death threats.

He was only 26 years old when he became the national spokesman for the bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala. Three years later, he was nearly killed by a knife-wielding assailant in Harlem.

By age 35, he had led the largest civil rights demonstration in Washington and won the Nobel Peace Prize. He had broadened his movement to include a Poor People’s Campaign when he was assassinated. He was 39.

Heavily influenced by the teachings of Mohandas Gandhi, King wrote: “The Christian doctrine of love operating through the Gandhian method of nonviolence was one of the most potent weapons available to the Negro in his struggle for freedom.”

King’s rise to prominence began after the Dec. 1, 1955, arrest of Rosa Parks in Montgomery. By Dec. 5, with Henry David Thoreau’s “Essay on Civil Disobedience” in mind, King conceived of the action as “massive noncooperation.” He rarely used the word “boycott.”

Strategically, he reasoned that “violence can be quelled with greater violence, while nonviolence can mobilize numbers so huge there is no counterforce.”

Yet the man known as a beacon of nonviolence also warned that the tactic could be widely misunderstood.

“Nonviolence can exist only in context of justice. When the white power structure calls upon the Negro to reject violence but does not impose upon itself the task of creating necessary social change, it is in fact asking for submission to injustice. Nothing in the theory of nonviolence counsels this suicidal course.”

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For a year after Parks’ refusal to give up her bus seat, the black population of Montgomery walked to and from work, sharing rides and carpooling when possible. Ironically, the city issued an injunction against carpools the same day, Nov. 13, 1956, that the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s order to desegregate the buses.

The Montgomery bus boycott raised issues of racial fairness in the nation’s mind, but Birmingham, Ala., revealed a racial hatred that many had never seen.

Birmingham Police Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor provided the civil rights movement its most shocking, violent and galvanizing images. After a march on May 4, 1963, newspapers carried pictures of prostrate black women, policemen bending over them with raised clubs; of police dogs biting children and high-pressure fire hoses sweeping bodies into the streets. The images horrified America and the world.

Without Birmingham, however, there would have been no march on Washington, “one of the most creative steps the Negro struggle has taken,” King said in a Playboy magazine interview.

By August 1963, when blacks marched on Washington, so did the nation. More than 250,000 people demonstrated for civil rights in Washington, and King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered that day, became the text for America’s hope of racial conciliation.

The real work of the movement, however, was not to integrate lunch counters and city buses. The real work, King said, would come in providing equal education, job opportunities and housing.

In this, the preacher was prophetic.

“Despite new laws, little has changed in life in the ghettos,” King wrote. “The Negro is still the poorest American--walled in by color and poverty.”

It is a tragic irony that in almost any major city in the land, someone seeking the most destitute, crime-ridden or despairing neighborhood only has to ask the way to Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

In his writings, King recognized an error that he and other civil rights leaders had made. They believed that an essentially regional movement would simply spread to the North and to the West. It never did.

The seemingly intractable problems of race, however, are ones he fervently believed could be solved.

“In the final analysis, the problem of race is not a political but a moral issue,” King wrote, but it is precisely on that front that America stands still.

“What we need is a restless determination to make the ideal of brotherhood a reality in this nation and all over the world.”