Seconds after the bullet struck Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. on a Memphis motel balcony 20 years ago, an indelible image was burned into the social consciousness of the United States:
A white towel is draped on King`s forehead as he lies, legs bent, on the bloody balcony of the Lorraine Motel. Members of the slain civil rights leader`s entourage stand next to him, their right arms outstretched, their index fingers pointing to where they believe the shot originated.
It is one of the most vivid pictures left from a decade filled with turmoil and violence. On April 4, 1968, one of the world`s foremost human rights leaders, a Nobel Prize winner, was assassinated by James Earl Ray, a habitual criminal who had spent much of his adult life behind bars.
At the time of his death, King had been making plans to organize a Poor People`s March on Washington. But two decades later, there is universal acknowledgement that, despite some highly visible advances, the plight of the nation`s poor has worsened in the intervening years. And a great many blacks- in the rural South as well as in big city ghettos-have become trapped in what some describe as a permanent underclass.
”The major program of Martin Luther King Jr. was the Poor People`s campaign,” said Hosea Williams, a former field organizer for King`s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and now a member of the Atlanta City Council. ”His death has resulted in something of a nightmare. The gap between rich and poor-the haves and the have-nots-has widened since Martin`s death.” Still, there have indeed been major accomplishments in the area of race relations: Blacks have moved into previously all-white neighborhoods in increasing numbers; major U.S. corporations employ blacks in responsible positions; separate-but-equal schools have become a thing of the past, even in the Deep South.
In the last years of his life, King had moved beyond issues associated solely with blacks. He had allied himself with the protest movement against American military involvement in Vietnam, largely because he believed the war claimed resources that could have been applied to social programs.
And in the Poor People`s campaign, King had begun to find a vehicle that would join poor blacks and whites, two groups often at odds with each other, by marching on Washington and demanding that a larger portion of federal revenues be spent on the needy.
Interviews with some of King`s closest advisers, with people present at the time of his death and with urban experts provide a glimpse not only of the man and the problems he confronted during his turbulent time, but also of the problems that remain.
In all the commemorations of King`s short life-he was 39 years old when he was killed-some of King`s former aides openly worry that inordinate attention is being paid to honoring the man rather than being devoted to his ideals.
”What bothers me now is, in terms of our attitudes toward King . . . a temptation to separate the messenger from the message,” said Rev. Joseph Lowery, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. ”Now we`re resurrecting the messenger and burying the message.”
Bernard Lee, who was King`s special assistant and constant traveling companion, said the line between the messenger and his message was blurred by King`s unique stature in modern history.
”Here was a style of leadership unparalleled with the exception of Mohandas K. Gandhi and Jesus of Nazareth,” Lee explained. ”We had not seen this before-a young black intellectual, a young black, well-trained person really use his training, his Ph.D., for the advancement of an oppressed people and for the advancement of the downtrodden in our society. This was a leader I had not seen before in my life and I have not seen since.”
David Garrow, King`s Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, said the late civil rights leader`s message was clear. ”The most important part of King`s legacy was an emphasis on economic justice and the elimination of poverty,”
he said.
Rev. C.T. Vivian, a former SCLC official, said King sought to transfer his philosophy into reality. ”He was talking about making certain that everybody had a chance, a real job, income . . . the basic necessities of life,” Vivian explained.
But King`s last project to provide those necessities, mobilizing a national march on the nation`s capital to underscore the plight of the needy, was crippled by his death and ended up being of little influence on Washington or the nation.
”You have to wonder, if he hadn`t been assassinated, whether the Poor People`s campaign would have worked,” said Mary Frances Berry, a law professor at Howard University and a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
”We don`t know. But the idea itself is there. Ever since his death, somebody has been trying to put that equation together across racial lines, dealing with the problem of poverty, restructuring the economy and taking care of the least in society. And no one has been able to put it together,” she said.
Rev. James Bevel, who was generally recognized as King`s top strategist, said King`s disciples have been unable to make a dent on the poverty problem because, in part, they lack King`s broad vision and have overemphasized the importance of electoral politics, government social programs and the power they command at the expense of the nation`s poor black families.
”King`s legacy has been perverted and prostituted to ensure the political power of middle-class blacks who make a living telling poor blacks how to live,” Bevel said. ”When I went to Selma, . . . (people) threatened to kill me. But now, if you put those black leaders up in a row and give them the choice of talking about real education or make-work jobs, they`ll push pork barrel jobs.”
Bevel`s former colleagues do not share that view. Rather, they point to the tremendous growth in the number of black elected officials as proof that the civil rights movement not only allowed blacks to vote without fear of intimidation, but allowed them to move into key power positions.
Andrew Young, who was one of King`s top aides, is mayor of Atlanta, the host city of this year`s Democratic National Convention. Another member of King`s inner circle, Jesse Jackson, is a major contender for the party`s presidential nomination.
The Republicans are holding their 1988 convention in New Orleans, which also has a black mayor. There are black mayors in Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, the District of Columbia and other major cities.
Still, black officials represent less than two percent of all elected officeholders and the rate of poverty in cities headed by blacks is not any lower than when the white officials they replaced were in office.
Berry said the key yardstick is economics.
”The important thing today, 20 years after his assassination, we are still focusing on the poverty that exists in the black community, which we call the underclass,” she said. ”We don`t understand, like Martin did, the connection between race and economics. We spend a lot of time focusing on one or the other. We have big fights about whether the problem is the black community, civil rights, or is it economics. Well, Martin wasn`t confused about that at all. He was able to have a broad perspective.”
Toward the end of his life, King cast an even wider net, linking the plight of the poor in the United States with an unpopular war this country was waging in Vietnam.
William Sloane Coffin, former chaplain at Yale University and founder of the liberal Clergy and Laity Concerned antiwar group, said peace activists had been urging King to take up the war issue, but he initially was reluctant.
”Our feeling was that it was so immoral that the pre-eminent moral leader should say something about it,” Coffin recalled.
But it was not those pleas that finally persuaded King to question U.S. involvement in Vietnam, according to Bernard Lee.
”We were on planes seeing the flag-draped caskets roll out of the plane`s cargo bay in Dallas, in New York, in Chicago,” recalled Lee. ”We saw the young fellows in brand new uniforms, on their way to Vietnam. And Martin would say that these young men probably would never return to these shores alive. To stand there and to see the bodies roll off the cargo bay in flag-draped coffins, you got to be sensitive to that.
”The thing that really got Martin more outspoken on the war was Ramparts magazine,” Lee continued. ”Ramparts printed an edition that showed pictures of our jets napalming, strafing Vietnamese villages. One of those pictures showed this hut that had been napalmed, burned to the ground, and the mother was lying there with a baby, a young child, clutched in her arm and they were napalmed in their sleep.
”If Martin Luther King ever had a moment of depression in life, a moment when he felt that he had kind of neglected his moral duty, it was when he saw that hut burned to the ground and then the frame of those two human beings-mother and child-burned and napalmed to death in their sleep. That really got to him.
”We were in Jamaica at the time, writing a book. When we left Jamaica, he was determined that he was going to speak out against the war.”
King`s outspokenness on the war issue provoked strong criticism from Roy Wilkins, then executive secretary of the NAACP, Whitney Young, president of the National Urban League, and white liberals who thought King should not stray from what they considered strictly ”civil rights” issues.
But King continued commenting on the war, and his last public address, his famous ”I`ve been to the mountaintop” speech at Masonic Temple Church in Memphis, illustrated King`s philosophy at the time.
” . . . We have been forced to a point where we`re going to have to grapple with the problems that men have been trying to grapple with through history, but the demands didn`t force them to do it,” he said. ”Survival demands that we grapple with them. Men for years now have been talking about war and peace. But now, no longer can they just talk about it. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world, it`s nonviolence or nonexistence.”
One lasting tribute to King is that many of the confrontational but nonviolent tactics he used in the civil rights movement have been adopted by many other groups, most recently by deaf students at Gallaudet University in Washington.
Earlier this year, the students boycotted classes, blocked the institution`s main gate and continued their protests until they were able to get a deaf person selected president of the university and a person who knows sign language appointed as board chairman.
Jame Laue, a former Justice Department official who was with King during the final hours at the Lorraine Motel, said the Nobel Prize winner`s legacy extends beyond protest tactics, his work on behalf of the poor and his activities in the peace movement.
Laue, now a faculty member at George Mason University in northern Virginia, said: ”The sign the sanitation workers were carrying in Memphis in 1968 said simply, `I am a Man.` It did not say we want $3.80 an hour, or better working conditions, or anything like that. It was a basic identity and recognition issue.
”In many ways, the deepest legacy of King is just that . . . the goodness of every human being and the ultimate equality of every human being.”
