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PROGRAM SUCCESS – JANUARY 2009
Martin Luther King from Page 3
under apartheid, with terrible consequences for America’s standing among nations. How could America have
convincingly inveighed against the Iron Curtain while an
equally oppressive Cotton Curtain remained draped
across the South?
Even after the Supreme
Court struck down segregation in 1954, what the
world now calls humanrights offenses were both
law and custom in much of
America. Before King and
his movement, a tired and
thoroughly respectable
Negro seamstress like
Rosa Parks could be
thrown into jail and fined simply
because she refused to give up her
seat on an Alabama bus so a white
man could sit down. A six-year-old
black girl like Ruby Bridges could be
hectored and spit on by a white New
Orleans mob simply because she
wanted to go to the same school as
white children. A 14-year-old black
boy like Emmett Till could be hunted
down and murdered by a Mississippi
gang simply because he had supposedly made suggestive remarks to a white woman. Even
highly educated blacks were routinely denied the right
to vote or serve on juries. They could not eat at lunch
counters, register in motels or use whites-only rest
rooms; they could not buy or rent a home wherever they
chose. In some rural
enclaves in the South, they
were even compelled to get
off the sidewalk and stand
in the street if a Caucasian
walked by.
The movement that King
led swept all that away. Its
victory was so complete
that even though those outrages took place within the
living memory of the baby
boomers, they seem like
ancient history. And
though this revolution was
the product of two centuries of agitation by
thousands upon thousands
of courageous men and
women, King was its culmination. It is impossible
to think of the movement
unfolding as it did without
him at its helm. He was, as
the cliche has it, the right
man at the right time.
To begin with, King was a preacher who spoke in biblical cadences ideally suited to leading a stride toward
freedom that found its inspiration in the Old Testament
story of the Israelites and the New
Testament gospel of Jesus Christ.
Being a minister not only put King
in touch with the spirit of the black
masses but also gave him a base
within the black church, then and
now the strongest and most independent of black institutions.
Moreover, King was a man of
extraordinary physical courage
whose belief in nonviolence never
swerved. From the time he assumed leadership of the
Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott in 1955 to his murder 13
years later, he faced hundreds of death threats. His home
in Montgomery was bombed, with his wife and young
children inside. He was hounded by J. Edgar Hoover’s
FBI, which bugged his telephone and hotel rooms, circulated salacious gossip about him and even tried to
force him into
committing suicide after he
won the Nobel
Peace Prize in
1964. As King
told the story,
the
defining
moment of his
life came during
see MARTIN LUTHER KING page 31