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Martin Luther King, Jr.
It is a testament to the greatness of Martin Luther King Jr. that nearly every major city in the U.S. has a street or school named after him. It is a measure of how sorely his achievements are misunderstood that most of them are located in black neighborhoods. Three decades after King
was gunned down on a motel balcony in Memphis, Tenn., he is still regarded
mainly as the black leader of a movement for black equality. That assessment,
while accurate, is far too restrictive. For all King did to free blacks
from the yoke of segregation, whites may owe him the greatest debt, for
liberating them from the burden of America's centuries-old hypocrisy about
race. It is only because of King and the movement that he led that the
U.S. can claim to be the leader of the "free world" without inviting smirks
of disdain and disbelief. Had he and the blacks and whites who marched
beside him failed, vast regions of the U.S. would have remained morally
indistinguishable from South Africa 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?
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.
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 the early days of the bus boycott. A threatening telephone call at midnight alarmed him: "Nigger, we are tired of you and your mess now. And if you aren't out of this town in three days, we're going to blow your brains out and blow up your house." Shaken, King went to the kitchen to pray. "I could hear an inner voice saying to me, 'Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth. And lo I will be with you, even until the end of the world.'" In recent years, however,
King's most quoted line—"I have a dream that my four little children will
one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of
their skin but by the content of their character"—has been put to uses
he would never have endorsed. It has become the slogan for opponents of
affirmative action like California's Ward Connerly, who insist, incredibly,
that had King lived he would have been marching alongside them. Connerly
even chose King's birthday last year to announce the creation of his nationwide
crusade against "racial preferences."
TIME national correspondent
Jack E. White has covered civil rights issues for 30 years
This article is from the "Leaders and Revolutionaries" section of the Time 100 issue in which the magazine nominated the most important 100 people of the 20th century. Copyright © 2003 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. |
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