thirteen
Martin Luther King Jr.

1929–68

fig297

TIME LINE

1929 (Jan. 15): Born Michael King Jr. in Atlanta, Georgia.

1934: Renamed Martin Luther King Jr.

1939–45: World War II.

1941: Attempts suicide following the death of his grandmother.

1942: Founding of Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).

1944: Enrolls at Morehouse College at age 15.

1946: US Supreme Court bans segregation in interstate bus travel.

1947: Jackie Robinson becomes Major League Baseball’s first black player.

1948: Graduates from Morehouse with degree in sociology; starts attending Crozer Theological Seminary.

1951: Graduates from Crozer; moves to Boston to pursue PhD at Boston University. Meets Coretta Scott.

1953: Marries Coretta in Marion, Alabama.

1954 (Apr. 14): Accepts offer to pastor Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama.

1954 (May 17): US Supreme Court issues Brown v. Board of Education decision, overturning Plessy v. Ferguson and ruling “separate but equal” unconstitutional.

1955: Daughter Yolanda born.

1955 (Dec. 1): Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat.

1955 (Dec. 5): Montgomery bus boycott begins.

1956 (Jan. 30): Home bombed at height of bus boycott.

1956 (Nov.–Dec.): US Supreme Court rules segregated bus systems such as Montgomery’s unconstitutional; declares boycott concluded one month later.

1957: Son Martin Luther King III born.

1957 (Feb.): First appearance on cover of Time magazine.

1958: Helps form Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), focusing first on voter registration. Publishes Stride toward Freedom.

1958 (Sept. 20): Stabbed by mentally ill woman in New York City.

1959 (Feb. 3): Visits India with Coretta to study Gandhi.

1960 (Feb. 1): Resigns as Dexter’s pastor and relocates to Atlanta; becomes associate pastor at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church.

1960 (Feb. 20): Woolworth’s lunch counter sit-ins begin in Greensboro, North Carolina.

1961: Son Dexter born. Urges US president John F. Kennedy to act against segregation. SCLC joins Albany, Georgia, campaign.

1961 (May 4): Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) announces and begins “Freedom Rides” in the South. US involvement in Vietnam increases.

1963: Daughter Bernice born. Writes “Letter from Birmingham Jail” after being imprisoned for demonstrating.

1963 (Aug. 28): Delivers “I Have a Dream” speech at March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom; meets with President Kennedy and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson.

1963 (Nov. 22): President Kennedy assassinated in Dallas, succeeded by Vice President Johnson.

1964 (Jan. 24): Twenty-fourth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States ratified, banning poll taxes.

1964 (May 22): President Johnson delivers “Great Society” speech, promising an end to poverty.

1964 (June): Publishes Why We Can’t Wait.

1964 (July 2): President Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act.

1964 (Aug.): US Congress passes Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, escalating US involvement in Vietnam.

1964 (Dec. 10): Awarded Nobel Peace Prize.

1965 (Mar. 7): Attacked along with other marchers at Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, an event known as Bloody Sunday.

1965: US Congress passes the Voting Rights Act. King issues first condemnation of Vietnam War. Watts Riots in Los Angeles.

1967: Participates in massive antiwar protests across the country. Publishes The Trumpet of Conscience and Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?

1967 (Apr.): Delivers famous “Beyond Vietnam” speech at Riverside Church in New York City.

1968 (Feb. 1): Two black Memphis sanitation workers killed in accident; strike for better pay and working conditions begins 12 days later.

1968 (spring): Launches multiracial Poor People’s Campaign.

1968 (Mar. 18): Speaks in Memphis.

1968 (Apr. 3): Returns to Memphis; delivers “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech.

1968 (Apr. 4): James Earl Ray shoots and kills King at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee.

INTRODUCTION

In January 1956 in Montgomery, Alabama, a young pastor named Martin and his wife, Coretta, sat at their kitchen table praying. Only twenty-seven years old, King had become the public face of the boycott against the city’s segregated bus system. A few days before, someone had bombed his home. In the aftermath, King calmed the anger of his community and insisted on continuing to practice nonviolence. But he was afraid. Now, Martin and Coretta were trying to decide whether he should step down from his leadership role. Few would have blamed him if he had.

Had King stepped away at that moment, America and the world would have lost one of the great moral leaders—but the King family would have been spared a great measure of grief. While King was alive, he was hated. White racists thought him radical; white moderates thought him aggravating; black militants thought him naive. Police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation hounded him. The Ku Klux Klan, White Citizens Councils, and their sympathizers harassed and threatened him. Never did a majority of Americans express a positive opinion of him. In the last years of his life, two-thirds of Americans held a negative opinion of the man who is now one of the most admired figures in American history.

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a prophet, pastor, activist, and family man. With his words and his example, he preached nonviolent civil disobedience. He drew connections between jobs, race, class, and wars abroad, and painted a profound vision of a just American future. From the pulpit, he condemned injustice, offered hope to those suffering under it, and called white America to repentance. Not yet forty years old when he was felled by an assassin’s bullet, he left a legacy that has inspired countless people in the decades since.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

The Wall Street crash of “Black Tuesday,” October 29, 1929, plunged the nation into the Great Depression. The economic collapse was especially painful for black communities, since the few jobs available went to whites first. The economic doldrums lasted until the nation began ramping up for World War II, a conflict that required a national economic and military mobilization. Huge numbers of black troops served bravely but in segregated units. The military was not desegregated until after World War II ended. Back at home, factories desperate for able-bodied workers nevertheless often turned away black men.

Cold War politics and the “domino theory” led the United States to send troops to buttress the government of Vietnam. Communist rebels in the north under Ho Chi Minh soon threatened to conquer the entire country, and America responded with what became the Vietnam War. At home, the Cold War also led to the “Red Scare”—a national hysteria about Communist sympathizers infiltrating American institutions. Sen. Joseph McCarthy led the way, with the ample support of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, which tended to see dissent as Communist subterfuge.

King was born into the system of racial segregation and violent oppression known as “Jim Crow.” In 1896, the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision approved a standard of “separate but equal” that was separate and unequal. Poll taxes and economic exploitation vitiated the supposed black right to vote. In the North, racism was just as virulent but often subtler, operating through housing discrimination, barriers to education and employment, and practices such as “redlining”—refusing services or charging inflated prices to keep people of color out of certain neighborhoods.

Jim Crow took de facto segregation and made it de jure (legal). Starting in 1933, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) began a legal strategy to attack de jure segregation. Lawyers convinced courts to strike down laws that violated the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. By 1956, one of the few de jure forms of discrimination remaining was segregated seating on buses. But de facto discrimination continued unabated, enforced by shop owners who would refuse to serve black people and corrupt law enforcement officers who looked the other way when violence was used to enforce racist practices.

While the NAACP fought discrimination in the courts, others fought in the workplace. King lived during the height of the American labor movement. Some unions were committed to segregation, but others represented black workers or saw exploitation of black labor as a threat to all working people, and they became potent allies of the civil rights movement.

Perhaps the greatest source of resistance to Jim Crow, however, was the black church. Even at the peak of the civil rights movement, many black churches opted against engaging in political struggle. Still, the black church, in all its myriad denominations and forms, was a source of hope for all who lived under Jim Crow. From the pulpit on Sunday morning, preachers would give voice to God’s love for oppressed people and inspire congregations to endure and carry on. Some would marry that message with action; others would not. But all insisted on their parishioners’ human dignity in the face of a degrading dehumanization—this while many white churches tried to straddle the fence, declaring their opposition to both segregation and protest tactics. Churches themselves were segregated—King would declare Sunday mornings “the most segregated hour in America.”1

In Atlanta, Georgia, at Ebenezer Baptist Church, Pastor Martin Luther King Sr. was part of the proud resistance tradition of the black church. His father had been a pastor—and so would be his son.

EARLY AND PRIVATE LIFE

Michael King Jr. was born in Atlanta on January 15, 1929, at home—501 Auburn Avenue—to Alberta Williams and Michael King Sr. When he was five years old, his father visited Germany and, inspired by Martin Luther, changed his name and his son’s name to Martin Luther King. The whole family lived together in the two-story house, and Martin was especially fond of his maternal grandmother, “Mama” Williams. Martin Jr. had an older sister, Christine, and a younger brother, Alfred. Martin’s father, grandfather, great-grandfather, uncle, and brother were all preachers.

King Sr. was a stern man who commanded respect. He took over the pastorate of Ebenezer Baptist Church from his father-in-law in 1934 and was well-known in middle- and upper-class black Atlanta circles. King Sr. was not averse to strict discipline and saw it as a means to develop his children’s character. He also provided a model of civil rights activism. King Sr. led local blacks in fights for voting rights, and he was active in the NAACP. Martin Jr. looked up to his father as a model of genuine Christian character and leadership. At a young age, Martin witnessed family members of great dignity, whom an unjust world treated as second-class citizens, resisting that injustice without ever losing their self-respect.

Martin’s father decided that his children would have all that they needed to succeed in life. Martin Jr. claimed he only vaguely remembered the Great Depression and usually had money for ice cream and sodas as a child. He was black church royalty, and his parents made sure he knew it but never took it for granted. He did suffer from depression, however, his whole life. When he was twelve years old, his beloved maternal grandmother died of a heart attack. King was supposed to be watching his younger brother, Alfred, when the boy, playing around, accidentally knocked her unconscious. The heart attack was totally unrelated, but King still blamed himself. He was so disconsolate he attempted suicide. King’s melancholic nature was one point of trouble in an otherwise idyllic childhood.

The other, of course, was segregation. Despite the benefits of class and the respect granted his family due to his father’s position as pastor, Martin Jr. was still black in the Jim Crow South. As a child, Martin played with a young white friend, but the friendship died when the two had to go to separate schools. Martin was a precocious student, first at Young Street Elementary School and then David T. Howard Colored Elementary School—both segregated schools. He was so gifted intellectually that he started at Booker T. Washington High School at the age of thirteen.

After 1942, with so many young black men serving overseas, Morehouse College—a historically black college in Atlanta—decided to accept exceptional students of younger age. King began college at age fifteen, graduating in 1948 with a degree in sociology. He worked summers in the North, noticing the difference from the more openly racist South and meeting white allies who were committed to ending segregation. His role models were Morehouse president Benjamin Mays, at once a minister, academic, and activist, and Professor George Kelsey, who insisted that his pupils question the authority of Scripture if necessary and link philosophical notions with social realities.

From Morehouse, King went to Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania to pursue a bachelor’s in divinity. At Crozer, he encountered the work of Walter Rauschenbusch, a white Baptist and the leading light of the Social Gospel movement, who insisted that the province of the gospel was not just human souls but social transformation. Rauschenbusch helped King connect his faith with an agenda of social change rooted in working toward the kingdom of God. Studying Gandhi helped King formalize his inclination toward nonviolent social change. The work of Reinhold Niebuhr, Christian theologian and ethicist, offered a reminder of the harsh reality of humanity’s sinfulness.

In 1951, after graduating, King continued to Boston University to pursue a PhD in systematic theology. He delved into modern philosophy and studied world religions. King was constantly revisiting his beliefs, and as he studied Niebuhr again, he decided that the theologian neglected the power of selfless agape love. He eventually wrote his thesis on Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman. (Thirty years later, a Boston University committee would confirm that King plagiarized portions of this thesis.)

The most important person King encountered in his studies, however, was Coretta Scott. She was studying at the New England Conservatory of Music, near Boston University. On June 18, 1953, they were married by King Sr. The two had four children—Yolanda in 1955, Martin Luther King III in 1957, Dexter in 1961, and Bernice in 1963. Coretta supported him in his work—and became a leading force in the civil rights movement in her own right—but often criticized him for doing too much.

In spring of 1954, all of this was still in front of the young couple. That spring, Martin, who had not yet finished his thesis, was offered the pastorate at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. On April 14, 1954, King accepted his new post, and the family settled down in a modest house in Montgomery. King was freshly into this pastorate when, on December 1, 1955, a Montgomery woman named Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white man.

VOCATION

A month after King arrived in Montgomery, the Supreme Court finally ruled “separate but equal” unconstitutional, in Brown v. Board of Education. But segregation on buses in Montgomery remained. Activists prepared a campaign to challenge bus segregation, and Rosa Parks worked with them. Parks knew exactly what she was doing when she refused to get up that December day, and anticipated the racist hatred that would come her way, but decided she was willing to face it.

As a young, handsome, articulate pastor without the baggage of long years in Montgomery, King was a natural choice to lead the Montgomery Improvement Association that organized the boycott. King had quickly made a name for himself in Montgomery as a powerful preacher. He inherited a black Baptist preaching tradition that emphasized prophetic preaching, call and response, and emotional crescendos and was already a master of his craft. His church also launched outreach programs to feed the poor and became active in the local NAACP. King also met and befriended a fellow pastor and activist, Ralph David Abernathy. They were very different men from very different backgrounds, but their shared passion for confronting injustice quickly made them colleagues and friends for life.

At first, King was skeptical that enough people would get involved for a boycott to be effective. But the response at a community meeting the night after Parks was arrested was extraordinary, and the boycott began a few days later, on December 5. The black community in Montgomery responded unanimously—not a single person took the segregated buses after word got out.

The refusal cost the city buses hundreds of thousands of dollars—the equivalent of millions today. It also sparked a violent backlash. Local whites threatened black boycotters. King was arrested twice, first for “speeding” and the second time for his role in the boycott. And, of course, there was the bombing of his house. In response, many in the black community wanted to take up arms in self-defense. King was sympathetic—he struggled with that instinct himself. But he argued forcefully for nonviolence and insisted everyone in the movement remain disciplined and peaceful.

The Montgomery bus boycott launched King to national fame and began the first of the two stages of his career. In the first, 1955–65, King became America’s most famous civil rights activist, organizing nonviolent direct action in opposition to Jim Crow segregation and suppression of voting rights. In the second stage, King expanded his aims. He pushed a holistic vision of a just and peaceful society—in both North and South. He mounted a Poor People’s Campaign, opposed the Vietnam War, and spoke out against discrimination in employment, housing, and economic life. He tied together the evils rampant in America, offered a bold dream as an alternative, and paid the ultimate price for it.

The Montgomery bus boycott lasted just over a year. On November 13, 1956, the US Supreme Court ruled segregation on buses unconstitutional. King called off the boycott on December 20. Violence continued—whites shot at the now-integrated buses—and King felt responsible for the dangers his community was experiencing. Despite doubts and the heavy costs, he never abandoned nonviolence. As he said in a 1957 Time cover article, “Our use of passive resistance in Montgomery . . . is not based on resistance to get rights for ourselves, but to achieve friendship with the men who are denying us our rights, and change them through friendship and a bond of Christian understanding before God.”2

In 1958, civil rights leaders Ella Baker, Bayard Rustin, King, Abernathy, and dozens of others founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). In contrast to the NAACP, the Montgomery Improvement Association, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and many other civil rights organizations, SCLC was to be a distinctly spiritual organization. King saw it as a complement to those other organizations and sought to partner with the NAACP on voter registration drives. The SCLC was to be the moral locus of the civil rights movement and the heart of the call for nonviolent social action.

Later that same year, King was in New York City signing autographs of his new book, Stride toward Freedom, when an older black woman stabbed him through the chest with a seven-inch letter opener. The blade came perilously close to his aorta, and he almost died. King refused to pursue charges against the woman, who was later diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and insisted that he had no hard feelings. While recovering, in 1959, he and Coretta traveled to India to study Gandhi’s work.

In February 1960, the King family relocated to Atlanta, where they would be closer to family and King would be able to copastor with his father at Ebenezer Baptist Church. It was from Atlanta that the SCLC would plan its great campaigns in Albany, Birmingham, and Selma, as well as the March on Washington. Though King was the national face of the organization, he never worked alone. Leaders such as Ella Baker and Bayard Rustin became instrumental to the civil rights movement’s success despite having to overcome sexism and homophobia, respectively, within it. Others, such as Abernathy, Fred Shuttlesworth, and Joseph Lowery, also played critical roles.

In 1960, four college students sat down at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, and refused to move until they were served. They remained the entire day without service and returned day after day, joined by hundreds. Over the next few years, the NAACP, CORE, and the new Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) all launched efforts across the country. CORE organized the Freedom Rides, with volunteers choosing to ride segregated interstate buses through the South to challenge the segregation that remained despite the Supreme Court’s decisions. Angry white mobs threatened, beat them, and set a bus on fire. The SCLC soon joined SNCC’s campaign in Albany, Georgia. King did not join every campaign. In some cases, he was invited and declined. He picked his battles carefully.

In 1963, King went to Birmingham, Alabama, home to one of the most outlandishly racist police chiefs in the country, Bull Connor. There activists had launched a multipronged campaign of marches, voter-registration efforts, and sit-ins. It became a turning point in the long struggle. Connor, his deputies, and white locals attacked disciplined demonstrators with dogs and fire hoses, and images of the cruelty shocked the nation. In April, King was arrested for demonstrating. In jail, on scraps of paper, he wrote “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”

The “Letter from Birmingham Jail” sums up King’s organizing strategy. He wrote of the importance of “self-purification” before “direct action” so that one can remain nonviolent in the face of abuse. He drew a distinction between just and unjust laws, citing Augustine in saying that “an unjust law is no law at all.” He reminded America, “Everything Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal’ and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was ‘illegal.’”3 King’s method of civil disobedience began with prayerfully discerning those laws that were unjust and then intentionally breaking them—bearing the consequences without violence—to demonstrate their injustice.

King’s strongest rebuke was reserved for those who claimed to empathize with his goals but decried his tactics. He addressed the letter to “fellow clergymen,” specifically the white moderates who criticized his Birmingham campaign. He insisted that the “great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of justice to the positive peace that is the presence of justice.”4 He decried the myth that progress comes inevitably instead of through action. He denounced the church as a “thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion” and implored it to return to its roots as “the thermostat that transformed the mores of public society.”5

At the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in August 1963, 250,000 people from all walks of life descended on the National Mall. King, against his usual form, prepared remarks ahead of time. Speaking at the end of the long day’s program, King began with a metaphor of a check that those assembled had come to cash. It made for a good speech—but not necessarily one for the ages.

King was a preacher first and always. The same phrases recurred throughout his speeches the same way musicians on tour hit familiar notes. As he reached a lull toward the end of his address, gospel singer Mahalia Jackson shouted, “Tell them about the dream, Martin!” King paused, then veered off script. “So I say to you, my friends, that even though we must face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream,” he began.6 The preacher in him took over. The rest is history.

The March on Washington is remembered as the peak of the civil rights movement, but those years included as much heartbreak as victory. Two months before the march, a sniper gunned down Mississippi NAACP organizer Medgar Evers. In September, Ku Klux Klan members killed four young girls with a bomb at 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. Young civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi, were arrested and then turned over to Klan members and murdered. In 1964, someone left an anonymous package at King’s residence containing tapes of his phone conversations and a note encouraging him to commit suicide. Years later, a Senate committee admitted the FBI was responsible.

In 1965, an Alabama state trooper murdered Jimmie Lee Jackson for attempting to register to vote, sparking the 1965 Selma campaign. On “Bloody Sunday,” Alabama state troopers attacked demonstrators marching from Selma to Montgomery on Edmund Pettus Bridge. The Selma campaign claimed more lives. All told, dozens of women and men were martyred during the civil rights movement. It is no wonder that King’s later speeches started reflecting a somber awareness that he might not live to see victory.

The disciplined nonviolent response to the bloodshed of Selma proved to be the civil rights movement’s greatest hour. In 1964, Congress had passed the Civil Rights Act. Now, the outrage over Selma forced approval of the Voting Rights Act, which gave teeth to the vote guarantees in the Fourteenth Amendment. It ensured that all Americans, not only whites, could exercise their democratic rights. In 1964, at only thirty-five, King became the youngest person to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He refused to take full credit for the award, instead honoring those who participated in the civil rights movement.

After the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, King pivoted toward working against economic exploitation, housing discrimination, and militarism. It marked a second phase of his career, one in which he broadened the scope of his social critique. It also marked a more turbulent time for the civil rights movement, as it confronted a growing white backlash and a rising black militant movement. King turned his attention north, frustrating whites who did not mind denouncing the blatant racism of the South but had no interest in looking in the mirror. King and Coretta even moved into an apartment in Chicago to draw attention to the disparities there.

King also infuriated both friends and opponents by speaking out against the war in Vietnam. American troops had been in Vietnam for years before Congress finally passed a resolution openly committing to the conflict in 1964. By 1967, more than half a million US troops were in Vietnam, with casualties escalating. Because those who attended college were exempt from the draft, young men from poor families, especially families of color, were disproportionately sent to fight and die in a war that was making less and less sense to the American people.

King’s critics, including the FBI, had long considered him a secret Communist. Moderate whites wanted him to stick to civil rights. Even King’s friends were concerned that opposition to Vietnam would hurt his public standing. But King came to see the Vietnam conflict as another great injustice. He began speaking out against it in 1965, and in 1967, at Riverside Church in New York City, he delivered a famous speech, “Beyond Vietnam,” detailing his opposition.

The poor and people of color in America bore the brunt of the war, he insisted. So too did the poor of Vietnam, most of whom merely sought the freedom of self-determination. In a cruel farce, King noted, America watched on TV white and black men “in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Detroit.”7 Communism would never be stopped with bombs and bullets, he insisted. Instead, “We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity, and injustice, which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops.”8 Vietnam, in King’s eyes, was a colonial misadventure rooted in militarism that brutalized US troops even as they brutalized the Vietnamese.

In his “Beyond Vietnam” speech, King hit on a theme—the “giant triplets”—that marked the second phase of his career. King saw clear connections between Bull Connor’s Alabama, Chicago redlining, and the killing in Vietnam. “I am convinced that if we are to get on to the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values,” he intoned. “We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”9 In his eyes, racism and materialism fueled militarism; militarism and materialism reinforced racism; racism and militarism emerged from a society of materialism that saw people as objects.

Confronting materialism and racism repeatedly brought King to Memphis in 1968 in support of black sanitation workers who were striking for safer working conditions and better pay. On April 3, 1968, he arrived once again, flying in on a rainy evening and immediately heading to speak at Bishop Charles Mason Temple. Worn down after years of hard struggle, the great orator nevertheless found the strength to offer inspiration to the crowd. He told the audience, “It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it’s nonviolence or nonexistence.”10 He insisted that the people in the room were on the path to making America what it ought to be.

King closed with stories of being stabbed in New York and death threats he had faced to show that nothing could stop a people determined to march to justice. He preached on the exodus story that has, for centuries, had such resonance in black churches, and the New Testament parable of the good Samaritan. Applause and shouts punctuating his every sentence, he told the congregation:

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 the promised land. 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. And 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.11

The next day, just after 6 p.m., Martin Luther King Jr. was standing on a balcony at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis when a bullet from James Earl Ray’s gun struck him down.

LEGACY AND CRITICISM

King’s belief in the power of God to redeem people helped him think of every opponent, even the most die-hard white racist, as a potential future ally. Of course, he was wise enough to prevent this earnest hope from disintegrating into blind naiveté. King responded to criticism with both humility and perseverance. When friends or allies questioned his choices or tactics, he was humble enough to acknowledge his faults and consider their points, and strong enough to stick to deeply held convictions. He had enough determination to continue the struggle even if it came at the cost of his own life.

White Americans did not approve of King. There were whites who supported the civil rights movement, especially young people, trade unions, and clergy. White Democratic politicians such as John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Lyndon Baines Johnson struck uneasy alliances. But many whites, like the Bull Connors of the world, were outright racists who thought King was threatening the very fabric of society. The rest were like the white clergy to whom King wrote the “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” They claimed to support King’s goals but saw him as aggressive, impatient, and impetuous. In their opinion, he forced unnecessary confrontations when working within the system might accomplish the same things more gradually. King called such “moderates” the great stumbling block to equality; history has decidedly agreed with him.

If King’s civil rights tactics disturbed some whites, his economic and foreign policy goals shocked nearly all. Northern whites were satisfied looking down their noses at their Southern cousins; when King started pointing out the racist practices in their own neighborhoods, they turned against him. Business leaders who thought Jim Crow a disgrace still wanted to profit from paying black Americans lower wages and charging them higher prices. His opposition to the Vietnam War seemed tantamount to siding with the Communists against American freedom and liberty, and confirmed for many that King was a radical, if not treasonous.

Gallup has numbers that tell the tale. At the height of the civil rights movement’s victories, and of King’s own popularity, only 45 percent of Americans had a positive opinion of the man, while another 45 percent viewed him negatively. By 1966, as he turned his attention north and began speaking out against economic subjugation and Vietnam, his numbers plunged to 32 percent positive and 63 percent negative. White supremicists such as George “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” Wallace ranked higher on the list of most-admired Americans at the time.12

The FBI’s treatment of King is one of the most shameful deeds in that institution’s history. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had his agents wiretap King’s phone and monitor his activities, and appeared willing to invent or believe any rumor about his life. In 2017, a twenty-page memo came to light in which the FBI attempted to tie King to Communist influences, made allegations about financial wrongdoing at the SCLC, and included smears about his personal life and infidelities, some reaching the level of the absurd. And, as noted above, there was the infamous incident in which FBI agents attempted to blackmail King into suicide with recordings of wiretapped calls and a note reading, “There is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is.”13 Recalling the way law enforcement treated black Americans before and during Dr. King’s time is a necessary starting point for any conversation about race and policing today.

King had critics within his own community too. Some black Americans thought he was wasting his time and risking a backlash. His tactics would, and did, get people killed. Louder voices said King was not sufficiently radical. King was only thirty-nine when he died, but to the youngest activists he represented an older generation of stuffy preachers who were too willing to compromise, bide their time, or take credit for the achievements of more militant young activists.

Some mocked King’s commitment to nonviolence as impossibly naive considering the reality of unchecked violence and murder, even at the hands of the law. The Black Panthers, formed in 1966, was a militant organization dedicated to the use of arms to protect black communities. Another point of controversy was over whether reconciliation with whites was ever possible. King thought the “Black Power” slogan needlessly provocative and not in line with his vision of the beloved community.

In most of these disputes, King’s foil was Malcolm X. Malcolm was a member of the Nation of Islam, a Muslim offshoot among black Americans led by Elijah Muhammed. Born Malcolm Little four years before King, Malcolm dropped his “slave name” and became Malcolm X. Malcolm was the movement’s most eloquent spokesman—offering fire and fierceness to match King’s poetic inspiration. In contrast to King, Malcolm X insisted on black liberation by any means necessary, was committed to striking back in self-defense, thought white America’s morality beyond repair, and saw self-denying love as a form of weakness. In his early years, Malcolm X was a strong advocate for black separatism and a strident critic of King’s work.

To this day, “Martin and Malcolm” are held up as opposing poles in the struggle for equality. The irony is that by the time of their respective assassinations, the two were more alike than different. King had become more radical in his critiques of American society. He no longer wanted just civil and voting rights but a wholesale overhaul of a system built on militarism and racial exploitation. Malcolm, meanwhile, broke with the Nation of Islam and, on a pilgrimage to Mecca, discovered white men he could call brothers. Discovering the deep main river of Islamic faith, he started talking more about nonviolence and the possibility of reconciliation once justice was made real.

Finally, it is worth noting some criticisms of King’s personal character. He was probably not faithful to Coretta during their marriage. This accusation was known at the time, though some (including Coretta herself) denied it. King loved his children but spent so little time with them that it is difficult to call him a model father. After his death, his family had little income or savings. In the end, King prioritized his work over his family, and we will never know whether he would have later better balanced the two. It is also the case that King plagiarized portions of his PhD thesis. One hopes that this was the youthful error of a young man attempting to finish the work while pastoring a church in fraught times, but it remains a distasteful mark on his record.

In its entirety, however, King’s record is one of stunning moral clarity and breathtaking eloquence. King popularized civil disobedience outside India. His name remains as synonymous with nonviolent direct action as Gandhi’s. King was a brilliant orator, the inheritor of a black preaching tradition that he took to new heights. As a young man, he was dismissive of the biblicism and intense emotion of his faith tradition, but his legacy is one of marrying those qualities with philosophical traditions to confront the real injustice he saw around him. He articulated ideas in a way that moved people to act, nonviolently, even in the face of great danger. King’s legacy is inextricably linked with nonviolent struggle—a cause he eloquently defended to friend and foe alike.

But above all, King’s words will remain the immortal core of his legacy:

I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of thermonuclear destruction. I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant.

I believe that even amid today’s mortar bursts and whining bullets, there is still hope for a brighter tomorrow. I believe that wounded justice, lying prostrate on the blood-flowing streets of our nations, can be lifted from this dust of shame to reign supreme among the children of men.

I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits. I believe that what self-centered men have torn down men other-centered can build up. I still believe that one day mankind will bow before the altars of God and be crowned triumphant over war and bloodshed, and nonviolent redemptive good will proclaim the rule of the land. “And the lion and the lamb shall lie down together and every man shall sit under his own vine and fig tree and none shall be afraid.” I still believe that we shall overcome!14

King’s entirety is embedded in that statement: the harnessing of poetry; the audacious moral vision; the demand for physical, intellectual, and spiritual sustenance all at once; the belief in humanity’s goodness in the face of evil; the emotion and hope of an oppressed but unbowed people; the rhythm and cadence and biblical allusions of a distinctively Christian preacher.

It is hard to imagine King having the same impact today, in a less-religious America. He quoted the Bible and made appeals to religious stories in an era when biblical literacy was far more widespread. The Bible and resources of Christianity were a common ground between black activists and white America. Though King would have undoubtedly welcomed a more diverse and pluralistic society, it is hard to imagine him following a similar strategy today. Indeed, many younger activists deliberately forgo this approach.

King left a proud tradition of social activism in the church, especially in the black church. Today, it is easy to overstate the extent to which black churches were/are “social justice churches.” But it is true that King offered a model of prophetic preaching, rooted in the gospel but in dialogue with the wider world, that inspires “Reverend Doctor” types to this day. King’s theology charted a course between Christians who ignore the suffering in this world and secular activists who believe that the responsibility for ending suffering lies in their hands alone. As King said, “It’s alright to talk about the new Jerusalem, but one day God’s preacher must talk about the new New York, the new Atlanta, the new Philadelphia, the new Los Angeles, the new Memphis, Tennessee.”15

Decades after his death, Martin Luther King Jr. has become a national hero, with a holiday in his honor and a monument on the National Mall. Politicians of all persuasions seek to link their cause with his legacy. A younger generation of black activists find fault with King’s insistence on “respectability politics,” insisting that people of color deserve dignity and respect even if they do not fit the white middle-class cultural norms represented in well-dressed preachers marching in the 1960s. They also rightly note that King was part of a civil rights movement that marginalized women and LGBTQ individuals even as it relied on their work. But by and large, in white and black communities alike, King is today considered a kind of American founding father—a man who helped make the American dream real for those denied it at our nation’s founding.

King’s popularity today makes us forget how hated he was in his own time. He evoked the rawest of racism and its instantiation in police power and a corrupt legal system. Many, many people wanted him dead. Even those who supported his general goals opposed his tactics and his decision to speak out on issues beyond race. Years after his death, many white politicians fiercely opposed efforts to declare a national holiday in his memory. Those who praise him today emphasize his nonviolence and not his radical critiques of American society. The memory of a man who once said, “a riot is the language of the unheard,” is used as a weapon against today’s demonstrators, just as white moderates criticized him in his own time.

King is popular today in part because his sharp edges have been sanded down. To truly honor his legacy requires grappling with the evils he denounced—those triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism, which still haunt our society—and recommitting ourselves to the vision for which he died.

LEADERSHIP LESSONS

Martin Luther King Jr.’s life and work offer a number of important lessons about moral leadership:

King’s story is about perseverance for a moral cause in the face of great adversity and how such perseverance so rarely elicits affection within a leader’s lifetime. More than fifty years after King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, America has still not fully confronted its racist history. The nation is still wracked with racial disparities in wealth, employment, education, incarceration, and violence, and remains far more segregated than we are fond of admitting.

There are “MLK Day Sales” at shops to celebrate a man who confronted consumerism, and his words are used to sell trucks in television ads. The radical elements of his moral vision for the “beloved community” have been swept under the rug in order to produce a safe national hero. King’s dream is not fulfilled. And yet, there are little black boys and black girls who join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. His life, and the times in which he lived, changed America for the better.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

  1. What transformed King from the leader of a local bus boycott into a national hero?
  2. What can King’s unpopularity during his own lifetime teach us about today?
  3. Was King right about the giant triplets? Where do you see examples of these triplets in your community or country?
  4. What were the criticisms of King during his lifetime?
  5. Read the “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” What are the key elements in King’s argument? What resonates with you?

FOR FURTHER READING

King, Martin Luther, Jr. The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. Edited by Clayborne Carson. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 1998.

———. I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches That Changed the World. Edited by James M. Washington. New York: HarperOne, 1992.

———. Strength to Love. New York: Harper, 1963.

———. Stride toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story. New York: Harper, 1958.

———. Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? New York: Harper & Row, 1967.

———. Why We Can’t Wait. New York: Harper & Row, 1964.

  

1. Cathy Lynn Grossman, “Sunday Is Still the Most Segregated Day of the Week,” America Magazine, June 16, 2015, https://www.americamagazine.org/content/all-things/sunday-still-most-segregated-day-week.

2. Zeke J. Miller, “Why Martin Luther King Jr.’s Lessons about Peaceful Protests Are Still Relevant,” Time, January 12, 2018, http://time.com/5101740/martin-luther-king-peaceful-protests-lessons/.

3. Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” in I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches That Changed the World, ed. James M. Washington (New York: HarperOne, 1992), 83–100.

4. King, “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” in I Have a Dream, 91.

5. King, “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” in I Have a Dream, 97.

6. King, “I Have a Dream,” in I Have a Dream, 104.

7. King, “Beyond Vietnam,” in I Have a Dream, 138.

8. King, “Beyond Vietnam,” in I Have a Dream, 149.

9. King, “Beyond Vietnam,” in I Have a Dream, 148.

10. King, “I See the Promised Land,” in I Have a Dream, 195.

11. King, “I See the Promised Land,” in I Have a Dream, 203.

12. Frank Newport, “Martin Luther King Jr.: Revered More after Death Than Before,” Gallup, January 16, 2006, http://news.gallup.com/poll/20920/martin-luther-king-jr-revered-more-after-death-than-before.aspx.

13. Beverly Gage, “What an Uncensored Letter to M.L.K. Reveals,” New York Times, November 11, 2014, https://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/magazine/what-an-uncensored-letter-to-mlk-reveals.html.

14. King, “Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech,” in I Have a Dream, 110–11.

15. King, “I See the Promised Land,” in I Have a Dream, 198.