World

COMMENTARY

Martin Luther King

T

hough I never marched with the
man his followers called Martin, I
followed Dr. King's career at fairly
close range, first as a student, later as a
Washington-based reporter for the for-
mer Dow Jones newsweekly, the National
Observer.
I first met Dr. King
52 years ago, in the
spring of 1956. The
son and grandson of
Protestant ministers
in his native Atlanta,
he graduated from
Crozer Theological
Seminary in
Pennsylvania, then
went on to get a
Mark R.
Ph.D. in theology at
Arnold
Boston University.
Special to the
When he came to
Jewish News
Oberlin College at
the invitation of the campus NAACP chap-
ter, in which I was active, he was the new
27-year-old pastor of the Dexter Avenue
Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala. It was
his first pulpit.
An African-American seamstress named
Rosa Parks, who later moved to Detroit,
refused to sit in the back of a Montgomry
city bus. She was on her way home from
work and, she said, her feet were tired.
When she was arrested, local blacks pro-
tested. Thus was born the boycott to end
segregation at the bus company, and later
in all public facilities, including department
stores and restaurants.
It was the birth of the civil rights move-
ment.

The Fertile Beginning
We sensed, at our small college in Ohio
that this was the start of something big,
and we wanted to be in on it. And so a
group of 10 of us, black and white, at a
round dinner table in a college dining hall,
fired off questions at this proud, patient,
earnest, young country preacher, with
the deep soulful eyes, whom our NAACP
chapter had invited to campus to tell us
about his new movement.
He had been chosen to lead the boy-
cott and we wanted to know: What did
he hope to accomplish? What threats had
been made against him, his wife Coretta
Scott King and their small children? Was
he afraid? Why was he doing this? Did he
really think he could bring down segrega-
tion in America?

He was the clarion call to conscience.

"...when we allow freedom to
ring, when we let it ring from
every village and every hamlet,
from every state and every city,
we will be able to speed up that
day when all of God's children,
black men and white men, Jews
and gentiles, Protestants and
Catholics, will be able to join
hands and sing in the words of
the old Negro spiritual, "Free
at last! Free at last! Thank God
Almighty, we are free at last!"

— Dr. King, from "I Have A Dream"

Dr. King's answers earned our admira-
tion, as did his talk to the student body
later that evening, when he cited Mahatma
Gandhi and Henry David Thoreau as sourc-
es of his evolving belief in what he called
"civil disobedience" That phrase, combin-
ing two words that seemed polar opposites
— "civil" and "disobedience" — was new
to us, as was the song that later became the
anthem of the civil-rights movement, the
stirring "We Shall Overcome'
I remember thinking that evening in
1956, as I listened to this earnest young
leader who talked haltingly but with logic
and passion: "If only he had the oratory
and the imagery to match the majesty of
his cause, how effective he could bet'
He developed those qualities in full mea-
sure over the next few years.

Personal Support
I became a strong supporter of Dr. King,
the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference (SCLC) he founded in Atlanta
that same year, the civil rights movement
and the cause of ending racial and reli-
gious discrimination. I led a successful
campus movement to de-certify private
homes in our college town that rented
rooms to white students while denying
those rooms to non-whites.
Besides convincing the college admin-
istration, we had to convince insensitive
white students, who took the attitude: "Why
should we all suffer just because blacks
can't live in certain homes?"

To me — brought up with a Jewish social
conscience — it was a matter of simple jus-
tice. The college agreed, and those homes
that wouldn't sign a nondiscrimination
pledge soon lost their student subsidies.
Dr. King and his SCLC organized a mass
march on Washington in May 1957; 37,000
people turned out to support the cause.
Partly in response, Congress created the
U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and a civil
rights division within the Department of
Justice to investigate rights violations. The
SCLC organized voter registration drives
throughout the South; they marched and
they campaigned for school desegregation
and better housing.
On the 100th anniversary of Lincoln's
Emancipation Proclamation, Aug. 28, 1963,
the most dramatic U.S. demonstration
ever mounted brought 200,000 people to
Washington's Lincoln Memorial. Highlight
of the event — the defining moment
— was Dr. King, at his most powerful, pro-
claiming what will ever be known as his "I
Have a Dream" speech.
I wasn't there. As luck would have it, my
Army Reserve unit was called to summer
duty that week. I listened to the speech
while spit-shining my boots in an Army
barracks at Camp Drum, N.Y. I offered to
turn up my portable radio so my bunk-
mates could hear Dr. King. No one was
interested.
I can still hear Dr. King's voice — the
stirring cadence of his words, his rising
sense of righteous indignation, the clarion

call to conscience — as if the event hap-
pened yesterday. His words moved me to
tears. More important, they touched the
soul of the nation, transforming a move-
ment into a national consensus.

Shifting Sands
From that moment on, the cause of
Negro rights became the nation's cause.
A tectonic shift in public opinion took
place that made it unacceptable to
justify, or seek to defend, racial — and
ultimately religious — discrimination.
Jews as well as Negroes benefited from
Dr. King's call to conscience.
I followed Dr. King when he took his
campaign for racial equality North. I
interviewed him in a rundown apart-
ment he rented in a slum tenement in
Mayor Richard Daley's Chicago. His path
was no easier there than in the South. He
lost significant public support in 1965
when he declared his opposition to the
U.S. war in Vietnam. He wasn't being
unpatriotic, he insisted, just standing up for
what was right.
Refusing to pull his punches to build
political support, the man who had trans-
formed a nation — won a Nobel Prize, sur-
vived the fire bombing of his Montgomery
home, the privations of a Birmingham jail,
a deranged woman's stab wound, water
hoses, tear gas, and dogs unleashed by
police and even the constant wire-tapping
and hounding by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI
— remained on the defensive until the end
of his life.

The Impact
When I last interviewed Dr. King, three
years before his death in Memphis, he had
become a legendary figure on the world
stage, yet a man of such equanimity that
I had the feeling he was impervious to
pain. Never have I been in the presence
of one so comfortable with himself, so
not self-conscious, so — dare I say it?
— saint-like. I had the impression that he
was totally at peace with himself and the
world, so dedicated to his cause as to be
unconcerned with his own safety.
In April 1968, while in Memphis to sup-
port striking sanitation workers, Dr. King
was murdered. Though a ne'er-do-well
named James Earl Ray confessed to the
crime and died in prison, the crime was
never solved, never thoroughly investi-

King on page A28

January 17 • 2008

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