Martin Luther King Jr.

By Carl Hendrick

On the 4th of April 1968 a visibly shaken Walter Cronkite announced on CBS news that Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot in Memphis, Tennessee where he had been lending support to a sanitation workers' strike.

The day before King gave a prophetic speech in which he said “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.” Following Cronkite’s announcement the news bulletin segued into a Budweiser commercial as a dying King was rushed to hospital. On April 11th President Lyndon Johnson signed the civil rights bill and America was to be “changed, changed utterly”

I don’t know what I was expecting when I visited the Martin Luther King site in Atlanta Georgia to interview the sites historian Dean Rowley. In the end it was nothing like I expected but everything it should be. The centre is situated in “sweet auburn” trenchantly described in Fortune magazine as the "the richest Negro street in the world" and an area in which black people have traditionally congregated for over a hundred years ago where they found safety in numbers. Walking down Auburn avenue I get the impression that this is still the case today even though it’s been over forty years since the achievements of the civil rights movement, and I’m reminded of that old adage; “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” The area is very run down and apart from the visitor centre seems like a place you would not want to get lost in after dark. As a white guy from south Dublin I feel very much like a stranger in a strange land. Across the street is Ebenezer church where Martin Luther King Sr. preached long before Martin junior was born. To the left of the church is Martin Luther King junior’s tomb and eternal flame. Hallowed turf indeed.

The legacy of slavery and the resulting civil war left deep scars not just in the south but across America leading to disenfranchised communities venting their frustration through acts of violent rioting. I began by asking Rowley about the 1906 race riots in Atlanta and what effect it had on the community.

“One national politician at the time said that the civil war only got started only because white people hated slavery more than they hated black people and that the war was really over slavery not over racism. By the 1890’s race, not racism, but race had become the accepted way of dealing with any kind of human difference. By the 1940’s and 50’s one of the reasons why Martin Luther King senior was so important was that he was part of the leadership in the black community that could negotiate with groups in the white leadership community. Atlanta had already developed the tradition of black and white leaders talking to each other that grew largely out of a reaction to the 1906 riot. Legally black people could vote in Atlanta so they started voting in municipal elections which also made white leaders want to listen to them but the riot was what really got the white leadership interested in talking to the black community.”

Rowley is quick to point out that there were problems within the movement however.

“There’s been a whole lot of historical amnesia about what else was going on in the 60’s. H. Rap Brown for example was a black leader who spoke in favor of violence who said something like “If we don’t kill a few of these honky’s then they’ll never learn to leave us alone.” There was an undercurrent of violence going on in the civil rights movement that Dr. King was always fighting against.”

In many ways Atlanta represents the focal point of racial tension in 20th century America. As well as being the birthplace of the civil rights movement, it was also home to The Ku Klux Klan which was originally formed in Tennessee but was reformed in nearby Stone Mountain and by the 1920’s had more than 2 million members.

“One reason why the Ku Klux Clan was supported so well was there was another organization called the white citizens counsel in the south which was comprised of leading businessmen and politicians who didn’t go out dressed as clansmen and attack black people but did everything they could to ensure that the clansmen who did attack black people weren’t prosecuted.”

One of the most powerful tools the civil rights movement had in their favor was the media. Images of peaceful black protesters being hosed, beaten, and savaged by police dogs were being beamed into homes across America and helped gather public support. Just as powerful as these images were the footage and interviews of the Klu Klux Clan whose vitriolic hatred disgusted the majority of America, although as Rowley points out the fall of the clan was an inevitable process.

“The Klu Klux Clan wasn’t destroyed in the 1960’s. It was destroyed in the 1970’s and 1980’s by the people who grew up living through the civil rights movement became policemen, and prosecutors, and judges. The first thing you have to understand is the extent of racism in the south that was obvious, the second thing you have to understand is the extent of racism in the north that had to be overcome in order to gain a ground swelling of support for the civil rights movement that could oppose the huge support for the Klan.”

This year marks the 40th anniversary of King winning the Nobel peace prize. I asked Mr. Rowley what effect did this have on the civil rights struggle.

“Something a lot of people in America don’t understand about Dr. King is that people who supported the civil rights movement considered King and his demonstrators as a bunch of troublemakers, and what the Nobel peace prize did was to give Dr. King credibility in terms of the fact that around the world people thought what he was doing was important and necessary.”

One fact many retrospectives overlook is the influence of transcendentalism on King who cited Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience as one of his biggest inspirations, and also quoted Emerson during a rally speech. I put it to Rowley why transcendentalism is not readily associated with King as much as say a figure like Ghandi.

“Dr. King had to stress the religious background of what he was doing. He had to talk about Ghandi because Ghandi was another religious leader. Because that’s the thing about the south, if you ask someone in the North “what are they?” you will get an ethnic identification like I’m Irish-American or Italian-American, in the South if you ask somebody you’ll get a religious denomination. He knew the trancendentalists as philosophers, I just think he didn’t use them as much in his speeches as much as religion because the religious examples were more powerful and more effective in changing peoples minds.”

In dealing with a figure like Martin Luther King, the tendency to look on him as a deity rather than a man in his own right with his own set of human weaknesses. There have always been rumors about him being a womanizer and a philanderer. I had always been under the impression that this was an attempt to demonize King from the extremist right, but as a hesitant Rowley explains there were truth in those rumors.

“He did have extra-marital affairs. Not as many as his enemies would want people to think but that was his major failing because in the black Baptist church there have always been scandals of ministers being involved with women in their congregation so that if the black community would have turned on him over anything, they would have turned on him over that. So it was sort of like he was lucky with that one.”

W.E.B. Du Bois once said that, “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line” Looking at the focus points of the ongoing Bush and Kerry presidential campaigns, America today seems more concerned with economic and class issues than those of race.

“There is a strain of thought in the U.S. that tends to be more political-radical that states that racism was always used to cover up class and economic differences in this country. Because race is such a complicated issue in America, I’d say that people are beginning to notice class and economic issues more than race issues. But those class and economic issues have always been there. Let’s put it this way, Americans grow up thinking that class differences are temporary; if you work hard enough no matter where you start from you can get somewhere else. Most Americans don’t look at class they just think someone hasn’t yet developed the proper work ethic to make themselves rich.”

I asked Rowley what were his own personal experiences of the civil rights movement in the 60’s.
“I didn’t see it back then, but today I tell people it was a little like living through a political revolution. Everybody knew somebody who was in jail because of it, everybody was talking about it, and everybody had to decide whether or not they were going to get highly active in it. Teenagers knew how the supreme courts worked because they were following the court cases going on at the time. The real high point was when Lyndon Johnson backed the 1964 civil rights bill because Johnson was a southerner who grew up in Texas. In a way it was almost something wonderful because there was always something new happening and something to look forward to.”

As I conclude my interview and thank the historian for his time I take a moment to look around one of the many exhibits in the main lobby. There is an air of solemnity which hangs around the Martin Luther King site. Over 150 years ago Thoreau wrote of the abolition of slavery; “For it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be: what is once done well is done forever.” The indignities suffered by King and the civil rights movement are matched only by the legacy which he left on the consciousness of America. I suddenly become aware of the gravity of what went on here in this part of the world 40 years ago and I wonder why this particular individual was thrust into a situation that could only ever have had one outcome. Did he have, as Shakespeare would put it; “immortal longings”? Was he just a charismatic spokesman? Or was he genuinely a god among men? I come to the conclusion that it was none of these things and that the thing about true greatness is that it defies comprehension. And as I focus on a wall hanging featuring a quote from his famous 1963 speech in Washington I realize that the events of the life of Martin Luther King were something that simply had to happen. It was a necessary occurrence. These were words that needed to be spoken at precisely that time in precisely that place by precisely that man.

“From every mountainside, let freedom ring. And when we allow freedom to ring - when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: Free at last, free at last. Thank God almighty, we are free at last.”
(28 August 1963, the Lincoln Memorial, Washington D.C.).

Reprinted with kind permission of the author.