King's legacy is all around us

Holiday helps us remember a receding era

Monday, January 16, 2006

Forty years ago this month, Martin Luther King Jr. moved into a tenement in a West Side neighborhood in Chicago, beginning one of the bleakest years of his struggle for civil rights. The Chicago police didn't attack King and his followers as police sometimes had in the South, but the hatred for the black leader in white enclaves such as Cicero and Marquette Park was just as profound as anything King encountered in Birmingham. And the political resistance to his demands, thanks to the wiles of Mayor Richard J. Daley, was undoubtedly more successful.

As King's era recedes, it is easy to forget the failures and frustrations that dogged his life's work. He isn't honored with today's national holiday because he gave stirring speeches - although several rank among the best in our history - but because he undertook the gritty, dangerous work of making America live up to its ideals.

Those are the terms in which King often described his work, too. In a 1965 sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, for example, King identified the source of those ideals in "those majestic words of the Declaration of Independence."

The first thing we notice about the Declaration, King said, is its "amazing universalism. It doesn't say 'some men,' it says 'all men.' It doesn't say 'all white men,' it says 'all men,' which includes black men. It does not say 'all Gentiles,' it says 'all men,' which includes Jews. It doesn't say 'all Protestants,' it says 'all men,' which includes Catholics. It doesn't even say 'all theists and believers,' it says 'all men,' which includes humanists and agnostics. . . .

"It says that each of us has certain basic rights that are neither derived from nor conferred by the state. In order to discover where they came from, it is necessary to move back behind the dim mist of eternity. They are God-given, gifts from His hands. Never before in the history of the world has a sociopolitical document expressed in such profound, eloquent, and unequivocal language the dignity and the worth of human personality."

Such was King's genius: to invoke pride in America's promise - and promises - even as he demanded a wrenching transformation of its practices.

If you ask most Americans today what is most responsible for changing their lives, they'd probably say technology. Advances in computers, communications, entertainment, medicine, biology and other sciences seem to catapult us ever faster into an unknown but mostly welcome future.

We tend to forget, meanwhile, that the social landscape of America has changed just as radically during the past few decades - in no small part due to a determined Baptist preacher who is honored on this day.