Monday 21 January 2008
The 1965 protests in Selma, Ala., were perhaps Martin Luther King Jr.'s greatest triumph. They pressured Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act within weeks. And yet one participant in the climactic march to Montgomery, Ala., noted that King appeared to be doing little: "He seemed to have his mind on something else all the time." Another recalled, "He seemed to be a kind of symbol, and an inspiring figure, but all the actual organizing and leadership was done by other people in his entourage."
These eyewitness accounts imply that King's role in the civil rights movement was that of a prophet and proselytizer, and not that of a general. But in a year when his impact on America has become a subject in the presidential race, it would be a mistake to minimize the many ways he moved the nation toward change.
King had a lot of help during his 12-year struggle, which began with the boycott of the buses in Montgomery in late 1955 after a bus driver refused a seat to Rosa Parks. Local activist E.D. Nixon was at first the prime mover behind the citywide protests. In 1963, the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth was instrumental in getting King involved in the epic 1963 protests in Birmingham, Ala. In Selma, King drew on the veteran staff of his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), established after his initial success in Montgomery. And he was challenged to insist on full voting rights for black people by the militants in the Student Nonviolence Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which began the Selma protests before King got involved. To a casual observer, he must have often seemed an on-looker at the revolution.
Historian David J. Garrow, in "Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference," does a superb job of apportioning credit in the civil rights movement. The two quotations in the first paragraph come from this book. "The movement made Martin, rather than Martin making the movement," said Ella Baker, an organizer of the SCLC.
And yet on Martin Luther King Day it is important to remember King's singular mix of contributions, starting with the Montgomery bus boycott. It helped that he was the son of one of the best-known preachers in the South. King could draw on the great strength of the black churches. Because he was educated in the North (at Boston University) he could easily communicate with the liberal philanthropists who underwrote the movement and with the journalists who spread the news of black resistance to segregation. And because he was young, not yet 27 when he first came to prominence, he could connect to the young people who would become foot soldiers of the resistance, even as he maintained the demeanor of the dignified preacher to appeal to their parents.
King received death threats starting in the early days of the Montgomery boycott, and when John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, he remarked, "This is what is going to happen to me." Yet he never gave up his brutal schedule of traveling, speaking, and protest.
By the early 1960s King had become the personification of the movement, an international celebrity, and frequent visitor to the White House, but fame never dazzled him. His aide James Bevel put it piquantly: "King ain't after nothing. Most of the time you see him he's trying to get somewhere to sleep."
After the FBI had gathered evidence of his friendship with the communist Stanley Levison, King never faltered in his devotion to Levison, one of his more trusted and perceptive advisers. "I know Stanley," King told Kennedy when the president took him aside to give him a warning in the summer of 1963. "And I can't believe this [the communist connection]. You will have to prove it."
Years later, historian Garrow discovered that the FBI had found out that Levison had stopped his party activities in 1957, about the time he met King. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who hated King, never told the White House. King was a better judge of character than the nation's top law enforcer.
King also had to deal with a fractured civil rights movement. The NAACP, the senior civil rights organization, was jealous of King's SCLC, and thought lawsuits were preferable to protests. SNCC favored grass-roots organization and thought King and his fellow ministers in the SCLC were too moderate. "We think the people should lead, but SCLC thinks there should be one leader," said the militant James Forman just after the Selma campaign in 1965. A few days later, King, assisted by singer and benefactor Harry Belafonte, negotiated a unity statement with Forman. King didn't let ego or insults get in the way of the advancement of the greater cause.
FBI wiretaps, death threats, factional squabbling - King did have a lot on his mind that day in Selma in 1965 when he seemed so distracted. And he had to leave the protest for a while to do a fund-raiser in Cleveland. No wonder he would delegate the organizational chores to his aides whenever he could.
King has figured in the Democratic presidential campaign this month, with both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton referring to his famous "I Have a Dream" speech in 1963. Clinton is right, of course, that King never wielded the power of the presidency to devise the laws that ended segregation in the South. But it is inconceivable to chronicle the civil rights era without considering his formidable presence.
In an e-mail last week, Garrow concluded that King "gave valuable aid and assistance to local activists and their grass-roots initiatives, initiatives that may well have expired in infancy if not for the motivational push and national/international attention MLK drew their way." Few Americans have wielded such political and moral influence.
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