Taylor Branch: Globalizing Martin Luther King's Legacy
The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.'s name carries more resonance than impact - noble, universal, yet bounded by race and time.
The official celebration of his birthday draws tributes to the end of legal segregation, reprises of landmark oratory and varied appraisals of problems for minorities. Yet despite America's high-stakes national commitment to advance free government around the world, Americans consistently marginalize or ignore King's commitment to the core values of democracy.
His own words present a vast and urgent landscape for freedom. "No American is without responsibility," King declared only hours after the 1965 "Bloody Sunday" repulse of voting rights marchers in Selma, Alabama.
"All are involved in the sorrow that rises from Selma to contaminate every crevice of our national life," he added. "The struggle in Selma is for the survival of democracy everywhere in our land."
His public appeal gathered an overnight host from many states behind a blockaded vigil. When white supremacists beat one volunteer to death with impunity, King responded with prophetic witness against the grain of violence. "Out of the wombs of a frail world," he assured mourners, "new systems of equality and justice are being born."
Selma released waves of political energy from the human nucleus of freedom. Ordinary citizens ventured across cultural barriers, aroused a transnational conscience and engaged all three branches of government.
After the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, King claimed that the distinctive methods of sharecroppers and students had revived nothing less than the visionary heritage of the American Revolution.
"The stirring lesson of this age is that mass nonviolent direct action is not a peculiar device for Negro agitation," he told the Synagogue Council of America. "Rather it is a historically validated method for defending freedom and democracy, and for enlarging these values for the benefit of the whole society."
This effusive axiom went unnoticed, but the blessings of freedom did ripple far beyond the black victims of caste. As King predicted, the civil rights movement liberated segregationists themselves.
The integrity of law enforcement rose with a stark decline in racial terror. The Atlanta Braves joined the first professional sports teams to spring up at integrated stadiums, and business radiated Sun Belt growth into a region of historic poverty.
In elections, new black voters generated the 20th century's first two-party competition to displace the ossified regimes of white supremacy. The stigma of segregation no longer curtailed a Southerner's chances for high national office, and fresh candidates rose swiftly to leadership in both national parties. Parallel tides opened doors for the first female students at some universities and most private colleges, then the military academies.
Overseas, as an amalgam of forces suddenly dissolved the Soviet empire atop its mountain of nuclear weapons, King's message echoed in the strains of "We Shall Overcome" heard along the Berlin Wall and the streets of Prague. Likewise, South African apartheid melted without the long-dreaded racial Armageddon, on miraculous healing words from a former prisoner, Nelson Mandela.
Students shocked the world from Tiananmen Square with nonviolent demonstrations modeled on American sit-ins, planting seeds of democracy within the authoritarian shell of Chinese Communism.
These and other sweeping trends from the civil rights era have transformed daily life in many countries, and now their benefit is scarcely contested. Yet the political discourse behind them is atrophied. Public service has fallen into sad disrepute. Spitballs pass for debate. Comedians write the best-selling books on civics. King's ideas are not so much rebutted as cordoned off or begrudged, and for two generations his voice of anguished hope has given way to a dominant slogan that government itself is bad.
Read entire article at International Herald Tribune
The official celebration of his birthday draws tributes to the end of legal segregation, reprises of landmark oratory and varied appraisals of problems for minorities. Yet despite America's high-stakes national commitment to advance free government around the world, Americans consistently marginalize or ignore King's commitment to the core values of democracy.
His own words present a vast and urgent landscape for freedom. "No American is without responsibility," King declared only hours after the 1965 "Bloody Sunday" repulse of voting rights marchers in Selma, Alabama.
"All are involved in the sorrow that rises from Selma to contaminate every crevice of our national life," he added. "The struggle in Selma is for the survival of democracy everywhere in our land."
His public appeal gathered an overnight host from many states behind a blockaded vigil. When white supremacists beat one volunteer to death with impunity, King responded with prophetic witness against the grain of violence. "Out of the wombs of a frail world," he assured mourners, "new systems of equality and justice are being born."
Selma released waves of political energy from the human nucleus of freedom. Ordinary citizens ventured across cultural barriers, aroused a transnational conscience and engaged all three branches of government.
After the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, King claimed that the distinctive methods of sharecroppers and students had revived nothing less than the visionary heritage of the American Revolution.
"The stirring lesson of this age is that mass nonviolent direct action is not a peculiar device for Negro agitation," he told the Synagogue Council of America. "Rather it is a historically validated method for defending freedom and democracy, and for enlarging these values for the benefit of the whole society."
This effusive axiom went unnoticed, but the blessings of freedom did ripple far beyond the black victims of caste. As King predicted, the civil rights movement liberated segregationists themselves.
The integrity of law enforcement rose with a stark decline in racial terror. The Atlanta Braves joined the first professional sports teams to spring up at integrated stadiums, and business radiated Sun Belt growth into a region of historic poverty.
In elections, new black voters generated the 20th century's first two-party competition to displace the ossified regimes of white supremacy. The stigma of segregation no longer curtailed a Southerner's chances for high national office, and fresh candidates rose swiftly to leadership in both national parties. Parallel tides opened doors for the first female students at some universities and most private colleges, then the military academies.
Overseas, as an amalgam of forces suddenly dissolved the Soviet empire atop its mountain of nuclear weapons, King's message echoed in the strains of "We Shall Overcome" heard along the Berlin Wall and the streets of Prague. Likewise, South African apartheid melted without the long-dreaded racial Armageddon, on miraculous healing words from a former prisoner, Nelson Mandela.
Students shocked the world from Tiananmen Square with nonviolent demonstrations modeled on American sit-ins, planting seeds of democracy within the authoritarian shell of Chinese Communism.
These and other sweeping trends from the civil rights era have transformed daily life in many countries, and now their benefit is scarcely contested. Yet the political discourse behind them is atrophied. Public service has fallen into sad disrepute. Spitballs pass for debate. Comedians write the best-selling books on civics. King's ideas are not so much rebutted as cordoned off or begrudged, and for two generations his voice of anguished hope has given way to a dominant slogan that government itself is bad.