Appeals to conscience, good are real engines of change

Editor’s Note: This column by The Atlanta Constitution’s editor appeared April 6, 1968, two days after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered. Its lessons remain relevant today and can apply now, interchangeably, to both black and white.

Martin Luther King Jr. is home now, forever. There will not be another King. If his truth is to march on, it must have taken fire now in the heart of the human family. The one new leader who is capable of replacing him is the American white.

He introduced us whites to our consciences. Then he paid with his life and left us here. Gone now is the convenience of being pressed by him to do what is right. If his life and death failed to move us to take our own worst natures in hand, to forswear the cruelty and complacency of the past, and to build here one nation in brotherhood because we believe in it, then he failed. He could do no more in his 39 years than show us the way. But he believed in us, believed we would follow awakened consciences.

We, American whites, alone have the power to finish the tasks he could only show us — to enable an American man of any race to get work, to shelter his family decently, to educate his children well, and above all, to be treated as a neighbor according to his character and not his color.

We can no longer draw back from the accusations of our own hearts and wait resentfully to hear them spoken by a Martin Luther King. He is gone. There will not be another like

He said love; they say hate. He preached nonviolence; they seek blood. He had a dream for America; they have contempt.

him. He has left it to us. And the burden passes now to the white American spirit in which he deeply believed, to the end.

Negro Americans must choose a course too while the white man looks inward for the decisions of conscience now due. False leaders are telling the Negro that Dr. King’s life was a lie.

He said love; they say hate. He preached nonviolence; they seek blood. He had a dream for America; they have contempt. He raised his mighty voice in the name of God and in appeal to that better part of the human spirit which quests for the noble and divine; they pander to the base and criminal instincts, to the beast that sleeps in man. Love thy white neighbor, he is your brother, Dr. King preached. Hate him, they said.

Martin Luther King Jr. fought these violent men, wrestled with them for the soul of black America, and went to his death in the process of proving — as, with time, he would have proved — that nonviolence and love and appeals to conscience are the only levers that move mountains. “The plain, inexorable fact is that any attempt of the American Negro to overthrow his oppressor with violence will not work,” he wrote. Only nonviolence and love in its commanding sense could rid the white man of the fearhate in himself, he said.

But before this brave and good man was in his grave the false leaders, no longer stayed by his powerful hand, were upon the Negro people like carrion. They defiled his memory with mad cries for retribution, calling for violence in the name of a nonviolent man. They hated and fought him in life, but they could not bring him down. If the Negro people desert him in death to follow the vicious false leaders who seek to undo his work, it will be as if the Apostles had turned from the Cross and said, “He is only a dead man. His life meant nothing. Let us join his enemies.”

His life meant only what we, who heard him, do now. On the white man, his death imposes a duty. On the Negro, it places a test.