Making Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday a national holiday recognized the importance of his life and writings in an appropriate manner. One is sometimes astonished to remember, thinking back on his relatively brief public life, from Montgomery in 1955 until his death in Memphis in 1968, that the Civil Rights movement was already well on its way when King emerged among a host of equally remarkable men and women as its principal figure.
By background and training, Martin Luther King, Jr., was well prepared to make the most of the nonviolent revolution which, in transforming the South, provided a training ground, a school, a university-without-walls for social change. Just as the Wobblies, socialists, feminists, and anarchists in the decade before the First World War, educated labor organizers and reformers for the radical 1930s, so the new abolitionists of the Civil Rights movement taught later generation about nonviolent resistance, agitations and community organizing.
In remembering the names of leaders in the antiwar and draft resistance movements during the 1960s, as well as later campaigns against the nuclear arms race and the war on Iraq , one can point to many who went South during the earlier period - on Freedom Rides, in voter registration campaigns, and the Selma march. For example, Philip Berrigan taught in a black school in New Orleans before he burned draft files in Catonsville, Maryland in 1968; Abby Hoffman ran a "Snick" (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) shop in Worcester, Massachusetts, before he initiated his "revolution for the hell of it" on the Lower East side in Manhattan; Howard Zinn and Staughton Lynd taught in black colleges in Atlanta before Zinn initiated RESIST in Boston and Lynd championed labor law in Youngstown, Ohio. Similarly, Rosa Parks disobeyed an Alabama law upholding segregation and Dorothy Cotton and Fannie Lou Hamer challenged traditional roles of women before Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem issued their feminist manifestos.
"The son, the grandson, and the great-grandson of preachers," as he tactfully reminded the clergymen addressed in "Letter from Birmingham Jail," Martin Luther King, Jr. was born on January 15, 1929 in Atlanta , Georgia . Educated at Morehouse College in Atlanta and Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania , he had been ordained a Baptist minister in his father's church at 18. In 1955, he completed a doctorate in systematic theology at Boston University . That December, he called for a citywide boycott of segregated buses in Montgomery , Alabama , while serving as pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist church in the shadow of the state capitol building. From then until his death in 1968, he coordinated and inspired nonviolent movements for social change through the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, focusing on the rights of working people, especially African Americans, and, later, resistance to the American war in Southeast Asia .
I sat in a Harlem department store, surrounded by hundreds of people. I was autographing copies of Stride Toward Freedom, my book about the Montgomery busy boycott `955-56. As I signed my name to a page, I felt something sharp plunge forcefully into my chest. I had been stabbed with a letter opener, struck home by a woman who would later be judged insane. Rushed by ambulance to Harlem Hospital , I lay in a bed for hours wile preparations were made to remove the keen-edged knife from my body. Days later, when I was well enough to talk with Dr. Aubrey Maynard, the chief of surgeons who performed the delicate, dangerous operation, I learned he reasons for the long delay that preceded surgery. He told me that the razor tip of this instrument had been touching my aorta and that my whole chest had to be opened to extract it. "If you had sneezed during all those hours of waiting," Maynard said, "your aorta would have been punctured and you would have drowned in your own blood." In the summer of 1963, the knife of violence was just that close to the nation's aorta.
Although King's name and achievements are known to many people, the deeper implications of his life, as the lives of many peacemakers, are often trivialized or forgotten. This is particularly true of his deep, persistent commitment to nonviolence. However, in Stride Toward Freedom (1958), he gives an account of his spiritual odyssey, from his reading of Thoreau in college to his study of Marx, Gandhi, Reinhold Niebuhr, and A. J. Muste during seminary.
Although he sided with Gandhi, King had to come to terms with Niebuhr's critique of pacifism. In the intellectual struggle that ensued, King noticed that Niebuhr "interpreted pacifism as a sort of passive resistance to evil expressing naïve trust in the power of love." But this was a serious distortion," King concluded.
My study of Gandhi convinced me that true pacifism is not non-resistance to evil, but nonviolent resistance to evil. Between the two positions, there is a world of difference. Gandhi resisted evil with as much vigor and power as the violent resister, but he resisted with love instead of hate. True pacifism is not unrealistic submission to evil power, as Niebuhr contends. It is rather a courageous confrontation of evil by the power of love.
Just how fully King took this principle to heart-and to the streets-is indicated not only by his positive peace-building, but also by his rejection of violence in the struggle for black equality and his resistance to the war in Vietnam . The piece of writing for which he is best remembered, however, is a classic essay, equal in power and eloquence to the Declaration of Independence and Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience." "Letter from Birmingham Jail" (1963), addressed to eight Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish clergymen who called King's civil disobedience to segregation in Birmingham "unwise and untimely," describes the historical, religious, and political justifications for his actions and helped thereby to win a nation to his cause. Reprinted in newsletters, newspapers, pamphlets, and anthologies, it has become the Common Sense of the second American Revolution.
In bringing together the principles of 19 th century American abolitionists and resisters-Garrison, Thoreau, Adin Ballou-and the practical teachings of Tolstoy and Gandhi, King gave the tradition of nonviolence a new and solid grounding in the American experience. Near the beginning of "Letter from Birmingham Jail," he says that in any nonviolent campaign, there are four steps: "(1) collection of the facts to determine whether injustices are alive; (2) negotiation; (3) self-purification; and (4) direct action." Then King shows how he and his associates met each of these conditions in Birmingham . He concludes with this argument for the justice of the black liberation movement.
Before the pilgrims landed at Plymouth , we were here. Before the pen of Jefferson etched the majestic words of he Declaration of Independence across the pages of history, we were here. For more than two centuries our forebears labored in this country without wages; they made cotton king; they build the homes of heir masters while suffering gross injustice and shameful humiliation-yet out of the bottomless vitality they continued to thrive and develop. If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands.
Eventually overcoming the indifference of the Kennedys, with President Lyndon Johnson supporting Civil Rights legislation in 1965, King continued his campaign for justice and peace. Although he was counseled not to by his former compatriots, in 1967, at Riverside Church in Manhattan , , he gave an historic speech now referred to as "the Declaration of Independence from the Vietnam War. " The speech, which indicated an astonishing knowledge of the history of Vietnam and the implications of the war in South East Asia , stands as one of the truly great speeches by an American. Within a year, he was assassinated.
In retrospect, it is almost impossible to believe how much Martin Luther King, Jr., accomplished in his short lifetime, as the man now regarded as the most significant figure in the history of nonviolence in the U.S.
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