MLK: A gift of grace

Ifirst met Martin Luther King Jr., for a moment, at a labor union convention in Buffalo in the summer of 1960. I had just finished my freshman year and was working a summer job as a reporter for the Buffalo Evening News. King gave a speech. I forget the subject. I made my way through the crowd of labor leaders, up to the stage, and I shook King’s hand and, with what were no doubt excesses of sincerity, told him how much I admired him. It was true.

One of the things that distinguished King was his air of gravity and dignity and formality. His body English was like his prose: stately, with restrained Biblical embellishments — the Moses note, by way of Ebenezer Baptist Church. There in Buffalo, he appraised me for a second (earnest white boy in hornrims) and replied slowly, “Thank you verra much!” …

I admired Martin Luther King as much as I admired any American in the twentieth century. I felt — still do — a reverence for him. Charisma is Greek for “a gift of grace.” King was a gift of grace to the United States — a country that may have been unworthy of the gift, or else unable to understand it. …

Few Americans have shown more courage than the civil rights workers in the South in the early 1960s: the Freedom Riders and others, those working for voter registration and access to public accommodations. … The most conspicuous and vulnerable of them all was Martin Luther King. He saw it coming (“I may not get there with you”), but he never stopped. His gift to the country, apart from the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, was his miraculous example of grace and courage. People associated the phrase “grace under pressure” with John Kennedy, but it more aptly applied to King. Along with the grace and the courage, there came with him a motif of forbearance, of forgiveness — good manners on an exalted level. Kennedy in the 1960 election made an acid remark about Richard Nixon: “No class.” No one in that time had more class than Martin Luther King.

— Lance Morrow, former essayist for Time magazine, writing at cityjournal.com on the 50th anniversary of King’s assassination, April 4, 1968.