Through MLK’s Eyes
America today commemorates what would have been the 88th birthday of its foremost civil-rights leader, Martin Luther King — whose eloquent dreams surely never included being honored with a national holiday.
Nor did he ever likely expect that even his children would live to see an African-American president. Or to be surrounded by black men and women sitting in the halls of power, from Congress to universities to executive board rooms.
Race, in other words, is no longer the automatic barrier it once was — even if we still have not fully reached the point where people are judged “not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
For that progress, we have Dr. King to thank. He turned the tide of history in just 13 short years, from the Montgomery bus boycott to the Poor People’s Campaign, before being cut down by an assassin at just 39.
And he did so not through coercion, but persuasion — by nonviolently asserting a moral authority that forced America to confront both its past and its present.
It’s become commonplace to suggest what King would say about today’s political scene. But that’s hypothetical — King’s views were shaped by his times, and times keep changing.
Already by the time of his death, Dr. King had moved sharply leftward. He denounced the United States as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” and opposed the Vietnam War, urging his country to “get on the right side of the world revolution.”
But it’s fair to say that the leader who fought for equality in the schoolroom would be dismayed by the continuing failure of too many children of color to receive a quality education — not because of Jim Crow, but because public-school systems today are failing their students.
And he would be equally dismayed that many leaders of the movement he led — including the NAACP — are now actively opposing efforts to remedy this through innovations like charter schools, which have proved that poor and minority students can succeed in the classroom.
Just as he’d be troubled by the political correctness of today’s discussions about race — and the near-impossibility of honest dialogue.
But he never lost faith in the gospel of nonviolence — or the fundamental belief that full equality and dignity for all could, and would, be realized in America. Which is why we honor and celebrate his life.