Transcendent Symbol

For Martin Luther King Jr., death came as a tragic finale to an American drama fraught with classic hints of inevitability. Propelled to fame in the throes of the Negro's mid-century revolution, he gave it momentum and steered it toward nonviolence. Yet the movement he served with such elo quence and zeal was beginning to pass him by, and nonviolence to many black militants had come to seem naive, outmoded, even suicidal.

Black militants used his murder to cry, "The civil rights movement is dead!" But they had said it long before his assassination. King was dangerously close to slipping from prophet to patsy. When his previous week's march in Memphis degenerated into riotous looting, a black gang leader who organized the violence chortled: "We been making plans to tear this town up for a long time. We knew he'd turn out a crowd." For years, behind his back, King's Negro denigrators had called him "de Lawd." Lately he had heard himself publicly called an Uncle Tom by hotheads out to steal both headlines and black support.

Yet if ever there were a transcendent Negro symbol, it was Martin Luther King. Bridging the void between black despair and white unconcern, he spoke so powerfully of and from the wretchedness of the Negro's condition that he became the moral guidon of civil rights not only to Americans but also to the world beyond. If not the actual catalyst, he was the legitimizer of progress toward racial equality. His role and reputation may have been thrust upon him, but King was amply prepared for the thrust.

Michael to Martin. Born Jan. 15, 1929, in a middle-class Georgia family active for two generations in the civil rights cause, he was the second child and first-born son, named after his father, Michael Luther King. The elder King, pastor of Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church, changed both their names when Martin was five to honor the Reformation rebel who nailed his independent declaration to the Castle Church.

The small cruelties of bigotry left their scars despite King's warm, prolective family life. He zipped through high school, entered Atlanta's Negro Morehouse College at 15, pondered a career and searched for "some intellectual basis for a social philosophy." Thoreau's essay "Civil Disobedience" showed him the goal, and King picked the ministry as a proper means to achieve it.

At Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pa., where he was elected class president and outstanding student, he discovered the works of Hegel and Kant. Here also he was exposed to the writings of Mohandas Gandhi, whose mystic faith in nonviolent protest became King's lodestar. "From my background," he said, "I gained my regulating Christian ideals. From Gandhi I learned my operational technique." Indeed, Gandhi's word for his doctrine, satyagraha, becomes in translation King's slogan, "soul force."

Moving on to Boston University, King gained a doctorate and a bride, Antioch College Graduate Coretta Scott, and in 1954 took his first pastorate in Montgomery, Ala. There in 1955, a seamstress' tired feet precipitated the first great civil rights test of power and launched King's galvanic career. Mrs. Rosa Parks's arrest for re fusing to give her seat on a town bus to a white man ended 382 days later with capitulation of the Montgomery bus line to a comprehensive Negro consortium and the U.S. Supreme Court. King, too new to Montgomery to have enemies in the usually fragmented Negro community, became its chief. His march to martyrdom had begun.

"All a Hoax." The initial triumph annealed his philosophy but taught him little about strategy. When the following years brought sit-ins and freedom rides, King was there with organizational support. He formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and midwifed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Nonetheless, his preoccupation with ideas instead of details was irking his own camp, and Albany, Ga., gave him a rueful jolt. In 1961, just two days after he led a mass demonstration and found himself in jail, vowing to stay there until Albany consented to desegregate its public facilities, King was out on bail and the campaign collapsed. "We thought that the victory had been won," he said. "When we got out, we discovered it was all a hoax."

Albany taught him not to attack a political power structure unless he had the votes. Thereafter he aimed desultorily at intransigent merchants, more emphatically at the national heart. His horizon grew, and with it his clout. In 1963 he marched into Birmingham, tac tically prepared, and flayed that citadel of Dixie bigotry on national television. Public Safety Commissioner Theophilus ("Bull") Connor became the white villain for King's black heroes as they marched--clad in their Sunday clothes --to meet his truncheons, hoses and dogs. That world-arousing spectacle brought whites flocking to the civil rights movement in a stream that continued to grow until Negro victories began to dam its flow.

Pinnacle & Hint. By now, King was swamped with speaking engagements, whose peak perhaps was his peroration at the Lincoln Memorial. "I have a dream!" he cried, and it seemed his dream was becoming reality. King reached the pinnacle in 1964, when he received the Nobel Peace Prize, becoming the 14th American, third Negro and youngest man to win the award.

Although 1965 marked the enactment of the voting rights law and King's successful campaign in Selma, Ala., it also brought the riots in Watts. To many Negroes, the pace of gain was too slow and too meager. King went northward, turning his battle toward economic issues in New York City, Los Angeles,

Cleveland and Chicago. Already, during the Watts uprising, there had come the first hint of King's tenuous tenure. A young looter, asked if he thought Dr. King would approve, retorted: "Martin Luther Who?"

More and more, King shifted and diffused his aims. He inveighed against the Viet Nam war, saying it hamstrung the civil rights drive and the war on poverty. Calling at one point for a $4,000-a-year guaranteed family income in the U.S., he threatened national boycotts and spoke of disrupting entire cities by nonviolent but obstructive camp-ins. His newly emphasized goals: "Economic security; decent, sanitary housing; a quality education."

Warning that the civil rights movement was "very, very close" to a split, he exhorted believers in nonviolence to become "more forthright, more aggressive, more militant." Late last year he added: "We have learned from hard and bitter experience that our Government does not move to correct a problem involving race until it is confronted directly and dramatically." At the end, he was organizing the massive march of the poor on Washington--and if Congress proved recalcitrant, he threatened to obstruct the national political conventions.

Slave v. Grave. Throughout his oratory ran a dark premonition that he would be slain. And with reason. Back in Montgomery, a twelve-stick dynamite bomb had been thrown on his porch, but failed to explode. In Harlem in 1958, a deranged Negro woman stabbed him dangerously near the heart. He had been pummeled and punished by white bullies in many parts of the South. He was hit in the head by a rock thrown in Chicago. When he won the Nobel Prize, Coretta King mused: "For the past ten years, we have lived with the threat of death always present." King himself had once said, "The quality, not the longevity, of one's life is what is important. If you are cut down in a movement that is designed to save the soul of a nation, then no other death could be more redemptive." In simmering Philadelphia, Miss., he declared: "Before I will be a slave, I will be dead in my grave." That epitaph hardly symbolizes what King stood for: life and love--not death and despair.

The nation may take greater heart from the luminous words he flung into the face of white America: "We will match your capacity to inflict suffering with our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force. We will not hate you, but we cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws. We will soon wear you down by our capacity to suffer. And in winning our freedom, we will so appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process." In his death, if not in life, Martin Luther King may have gone far toward that goal.

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