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National Mall ready to take on new look

King memorial honors a man who changed a natio

King memorial honors a man who changed a natio

Thursday, August 18, 2011

USA Today

ATLANTA — Thousands of people from across the nation will travel to Washington, D.C., next week for the unveiling of a long-sought National Mall memorial honoring Martin Luther King Jr. and the non-violent protest movement he led.

The memorial, surrounded by those dedicated to Franklin D. Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, will be the first major memorial on the Mall for a non-president and African American.

This New South capital, where King was born and buried, seems a good place to ponder a question that resonates with two generations of Americans who know him only through history books and school projects: Who was Martin Luther King Jr., and why does he merit a spot in the nation's pantheon of heroes?

"He made sure that equal rights were granted to all people, whether black or white or whatever," says Marlon Jones, 21, of Dallas, a junior at King's alma mater, Morehouse College in Atlanta. "And he did it in a way that some people might see as not the best way, but if he had done it in a violent manner, it wouldn't have turned out the way it did. Violence is always met with more violence."

Deane Bonner, president of the NAACP chapter in Cobb County, Ga., says she was inspired to activism after hearing King speak at a church in Columbus, Ohio, in 1961. "Dr. King's place is so paramount to us because he was a man of non-violence," she says. "In spite of everything that was going on in the country, Dr. King turned the other cheek. A man of peace certainly should have a place on the Mall."

The official dedication of the King Memorial will be Aug. 28, the 48th anniversary of King's transformative "I Have a Dream" speech at the 1963 March on Washington. By then, King had been crisscrossing the nation non-stop for eight years, relentlessly attacking an entrenched system of legalized racial segregation that relegated blacks, especially those in the South, to a life of second-class citizenship.

King's efforts — and those of hundreds of thousands who were part of the civil rights movement in ways large and small — would lead to two pieces of landmark legislation in the mid-1960s: The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned discrimination in public places and employment and provided for integration; and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibited discriminatory voting practices such as poll taxes and literacy tests that Southern states adopted after the Civil War.

King "symbolizes a movement that changed America," says Clayborne Carson, editor of King's papers and director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University. "Whatever people might say about whether the movement would have happened without him, it's clear that he was a central part of the movement."

A huge majority of Americans — 91% — approve of the memorial, according to a new USA TODAY/Gallup Poll. The poll, conducted Aug. 4-7, found that 99% of black adults and 89% of white adults approve.

Joseph Lowery, 89, a King associate sometimes now called "the dean of the civil rights movement," traces a direct line from King's soaring oratory at the Lincoln Memorial to the inauguration of the nation's first African American president in 2009, and this month's opening of the King Memorial.

"Martin issued the challenge in 1963, and to the nation's credit, it responded in November 2008," says Lowery, who gave the benediction at President Obama's inauguration. "That election represented a new birth of freedom. This monument says the same thing that the election says. The election didn't usher us into a post-racial period, but it did signify change. And that began with the movement."

When King was born on Jan. 15, 1929 — in a house his maternal grandparents owned at 501 Auburn Ave. — the South was totally segregated.

In the early decades of the 20th century, Southern legislatures — rolling back gains made by blacks after the Civil War — enacted laws requiring that the races be kept separate in virtually every aspect of life: schools, restaurants, movie theaters, hospital, hotels, trains and buses, public bathrooms, drinking fountains, even red-light districts.

This Jim Crow society was enforced by the legal system, by police and by the terrorist actions of groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. Most black Southerners — even middle-class families such as King's — bitterly accepted this way of life.

King, a minister's son who entered Morehouse College at age 15, "had his first frank discussions about race on the Morehouse campus," according to Taylor Branch's Pulitzer Prize-winning history, Parting the Waters. King's exposure to new ideas, and especially his participation in interracial student organizations, moved him beyond his Baptist fundamentalist upbringing.

By the time he was ordained in 1947 — becoming an assistant pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church here, where his father, "Daddy" King, was pastor — King was beginning to ponder a social gospel that would take him beyond the traditional black pulpit.

After graduating from Morehouse and Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pa., King went to Boston University to pursue a doctorate.

In 1952, he met Coretta Scott, a native of Perry County, Ala., who was studying at the New England Conservatory of Music. Daddy King married them on June 18, 1953. The following April, King became pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala.

A pivotal moment

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks boarded a city bus in Montgomery and sat in a seat reserved for white passengers. She refused to move and was arrested. Blacks in Montgomery, whose previous attempts to desegregate the buses had fizzled, rallied to her defense, organizing a massive boycott of the Montgomery Bus Line.

King soon emerged as the leader. He was arrested for the first of many times early in the boycott; his wife and young daughter escaped injury when his house was firebombed.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott lasted until Dec. 20, 1956, ending after the Supreme Court affirmed that Alabama's law requiring segregation on buses was unconstitutional. Extensive press coverage of the boycott made King the leading voice of the nation's nascent civil rights movement.

After Montgomery, King was the target of constant death threats; in 1958, a would-be assassin stabbed him in the chest with a letter opener as he signed books in Harlem.

King nonetheless traversed the nation — registering black voters, leading demonstrations, making speeches. He logged hundreds of thousands of miles: Atlanta; Nashville; Los Angeles; Chicago; Albany, Ga.; Shreveport, La.; and on and on. Then it was Birmingham, Ala., where police turned fire hoses and police dogs on protesters, some of them children.

There, King wrote the famous "Letter from Birmingham Jail," chastising the city's white clergy, defending civil disobedience and laying out his beliefs.

The April 16, 1963, letter, which King began drafting on the margins of a newspaper, highlights the spiritual passion and conviction that drove King throughout his life.

"I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham," he wrote. "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

His simple, unshakable commitment — I will stand here, and let you strike me and I will turn the other cheek because I am morally right — drew thousands to King's cause.

On Aug. 28, 1963, more than 250,000 people gathered in the nation's capital for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. It was the largest demonstration in Washington to that point, and one of the first with wide television coverage. King riveted the crowd and the television audience: "I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.'"

"Now, more than ever before, … white America was confronted with the undeniable justice of blacks' demands," David Garrow wrote in his Pulitzer Prize-winning history, Bearing the Cross. Yet, less than three weeks later, on September 15, 1963, four young girls at Birmingham's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church were killed when the church was bombed — the most devastating loss of life the movement had suffered.

In 1964, King, then 35, became the youngest-ever recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.

He spent much of 1965 in Selma, Ala., demonstrating for voting rights before turning his attention to anti-poverty efforts and opposition to the Vietnam War.

The memorial on the Mall honors the King of those early years, Carson says.

"At the time of his death (in 1968), he was probably at his lowest point of popularity because of the anti-poverty campaign and his opposition to the Vietnam War," Carson says. "Right before his death, it seemed like the country had turned against him. Very few black leaders supported him," fearing that King's expansion beyond civil rights would cause a backlash against the movement.

On April 4, 1968, King was assassinated in Memphis, a day after delivering his mesmerizing "I've been to the mountaintop" speech to striking sanitation workers.

The new USA TODAY/Gallup Poll found that as the segregated way of life he helped eradicate has faded away, opinions of King have evolved.

In 1966, just 12% of Americans had a highly favorable view of King, and 44% had a highly unfavorable view; the new poll finds that 69% now have a highly favorable view and just 1% a highly unfavorable view.

Man with a common touch

Those who knew King personally often talk about his courage, common touch and especially, sense of humor.

"I never saw him afraid," Lowery says. "Not ever. He knew the dangers he faced. He told me once, 'Joe, I'll never live to be 40.' And I said, 'Oh, hush. You know you're going to live to be old and gray.' But he died at 39. That knowledge never deterred him. … He had a consciousness, a deep faith. It was his spirit that kept us going."

King shunned the trappings of wealth that often defined a successful black minister of his era. He lived in a modest, rented house here, drove a 4-year-old Ford with 70,000 miles on it and donated all of his $54,000 Nobel Prize award to the movement.

Martin Luther King III cites his father's sense of humor and dedication as things he remembers the most.

"Because my father had to be serious in most of his presentations, a lot of people do not know just how humorous he was," he says. "My father was a very, very funny man."

He reflects on his father's seriousness of purpose when considering his memorial on the National Mall.

"I think he was a true American patriot," King says. "He said the way is for us to work together and to change laws so that we have the kind of society where all are treated with dignity and respect and equality. So in a sense, he helped to save this nation, because we could have had a bloody revolution."

Perhaps the truest gauge of King's legacy is found in the voices of Americans born decades after his death. For a generation often seen as more in tune with hip-hop's macho posturing than with spiritually centered conflict resolution, King's non-violent philosophy is broadly respected.

His appeal with youth reaches across race, gender and religion. Amber Khan, 21, is Muslim and a sophomore at Chattahoochee Technical College here. Her parents emigrated from Pakistan long before she was born.

King, she says, "brought to light the fact that every human has a heartbeat and has blood that's flowing, and it's about accepting people, not judging them."

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