Can We Live up to the Legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.?
Today is January 15, 2024, and it is the 95th birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. As a child, I always noted January 15th, as it is my grandfather’s birthday and eight days before my own. Later in life and as a father, January 15th became even more special, because it is my daughter’s birthday. Indeed, and while my daughter has always been grateful to have the day off on her birthday each year, she is also quite proud of sharing her birthday with Dr. King, whom she admires. Dr. King deserves not only her admiration but the admiration of a nation as one of its most influential leaders during the civil rights movement in the mid-20th century. In honor of his life and, in large part, the positive, Christian influence which he provided a nation during a most tumultuous era, we have made Dr. King’s birthday a national holiday.
On November 2, 1983, President Ronald Reagan signed a bill from Congress making Dr. King’s birthday a national holiday. The actual law unceremoniously reads as follows:
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That section 6103(a) of title 5, United States Code, is amended by inserting immediately below the item relating to New Year’s Day the following: “Birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr., the third Monday in January.
While the actual text of the law provides no context for Dr. King’s historical importance, we hazard to dishonor his memory on this day without any proper reflection as to why Dr. King is significant enough to our American journey in the pursuit of happiness for us to commemorate his life every single year.
In order to understand Dr. King’s legacy, it is important to understand the world in which he was born. Dr. King was born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1929. While the Civil War conclusively determined that the United States would no longer permit slavery, guaranteeing the rights under the Constitution for blacks would be less forthcoming. From Reconstruction after the war until after World War II, blacks in America were treated as second class citizens and terrorized by the Ku Klux Klan in the South. There were separate facilities for blacks and whites like black/colored bathrooms and drinking fountains. As made famous by Rosa Parks who refused to sit on the back of the bus, blacks and whites were separated on public transportation.
Segregation was also more subtle. My father told me that in rural West Virginia in the mid-1950s, black folks got off the sidewalk and walked on the street when passing white folks. As a child, my father did not understand why they walked on the street except that they were being kind. Also, in rural West Virginia and while the white folks sat on the ground level when watching films, the local theater had a balcony for the black folks in front of which was a glass front all the way to the ceiling. Again, and as a child, my father thought that the separate room created by the glass front was so that nobody would throw anything down. This discriminatory social system maintained in the aftermath of Reconstruction had existed and continued in the United States, and in the South in particular, for nearly 100 years after our nation freed all slaves. It is this world in which Dr. King was born, and it is this world that Dr. King sought to change.
The civil rights period dominates the late 1950s and the 1960s and is widely considered the most important social movement of the past century. The civil rights movement began with the United States Supreme Court’s holding in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), in which the Court found that its previous ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 was erroneous. In Plessy, the Court held that separate facilities for different races did not violate the Constitution’s equal protection provisions of the 14th Amendment so long as the facilities were equal. In overturning Plessy some five decades later, the Supreme Court in 1954 concluded that separate facilities are inherently unequal and that segregation by race was abhorrent to the equal protection provisions of the 14th Amendment.
Around the time of Brown v. Board of Education, Dr. King rose to prominence as a minister and leader in the civil rights movement which sought to achieve equal protection under the law for blacks as well as social equality, which Reconstruction failed to achieve. In his “I Have a Dream” speech given on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963, Dr. King demanded that the United States live up to its promise of democracy. Regarding the treatment of blacks in America at the time, Dr. King noted that 100 years after the Civil War “the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination” and that “the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.”
Dr. King dreamed that the “sweltering with the heat of oppression will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice” and that his “four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Dr. King then preached that “one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.” On April 4, 1968, Dr, King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee.
So, how are we coming along with the colorblind world envisioned by Dr. King? After 60 years since Dr. King’s speech, there is little segregation of public facilities. While University of California Berkely and Harvard University host black only graduations and the mayor of Boston recently stunned the public by hosting a Christmas party for staff who was not white, race-based discrimination in public facilities still exists. In fact, and in 2023 and almost 60 years after Dr. King’s speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial, the United States Supreme Court again had to weigh in on discrimination in America in connection with university admission in its decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. In this landmark decision, the Supreme Court held that Harvard’s admission policies unconstitutionally discriminated against Asian students.
We are still have a ways to go in race relations, but Dr. King before his death envisioned the promised land. “Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!”
For scholarship on the civil rights movement, please see Taylor Branch’s book, Parting the Waters. Delving into the inner machinations of the civil rights movement, Taylor Branch, a self-described storyteller and American author who chronicled the civil rights movement and the life of Dr. King, wrote Parting the Waters which is the epic story of the civil rights movement from Dr. King to the Kennedys. Branch concludes that the civil rights movement was revolutionary and not seen in America since the Civil War. Branch even details the inner workings of the movement and the sometimes-adversarial relationships of members thereof evidencing a strife in the movement as well. Branch’s work Parting the Waters is considered one of the best compilations of the inner machinations of the civil rights movement and a “must read” for those truly interested in this important historical topic and in the life of Dr. King.
Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters : America in the King Years, 1954-63. First Touchstone edition. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989.
