Peter Conn & Steven Conn: Remembering Martin Luther King Jr.

If he had lived to celebrate his birthday this month, Martin Luther King Jr., would have been 72 years old -- no longer young, to be sure, but young enough to be playing an active role in the nation's political and cultural debates. His death, now almost 33 years ago, deprived America of one of its strongest and most necessary voices.

Like all larger-than-life figures, King's posthumous reputation has tended to become one-dimensional and iconic. As he retreats further into the past, the complexity and controversy that shaped his career have gradually evaporated, leaving behind a symbolic residue and a few images: King delivering his speech, "I Have a Dream," at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963; King receiving the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1964; King on the bridge at Selma in 1965.

While these dramatic moments have a legitimate claim on our historical memory, they tend both to simplify King's life and to obscure the collective and communal nature of the Civil Rights Movement. In the 1950s and 1960s, Martin Luther King was a leader and eloquent spokesman for the unprecedented outpouring of energy and effort that rose up in opposition to over two centuries of American apartheid. But he was part of a broad and deep coalition of people and movements that assembled in the post-war years.

In 1954, the Supreme Court, in Brown v. Board of Education, ruled that racially segregated schools were unconstitutional and thus reversed decades of federal complicity with racist law. On Dec. 1, 1955, Rosa Parks made her own permanent imprint on history when she refused to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Ala. bus. In February 1960, four young men -- freshmen at North Carolina A&T; and still in their teens -- sat down at the lunch counter of a Woolworth's Department Store on South Elm Street in Greensboro, N.C.

These were just a few of the other men and women who created the revolution that re-shaped America's laws, and -- more important -- re-defined the nation's expectation of itself. Dr. King had much good company in his years of struggle.

He also had strong competitors. Throughout his most prominent years, King's leadership was fiercely contested. Stokley Carmichael, who headed the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee after 1966, called for "Black Power," and subjected King to frequent attack, urging him toward greater militance in his methods and message. The Black Panthers announced their establishment in the fall of 1966 in a 10-point platform that bore few traces of King's patience or his insistence that change must be achieved non-violently. Above all, King found his ideals and tactics called into question by Malcolm X, whose charismatic presence offered a fundamentally different embodiment of African-American aspirations.

Within the turmoil of the '50s and '60s, King's own positions steadily evolved and changed, something we tend to forget when we fix our heroes in amber. His opposition to the Vietnam War and his initiation of a Poor People's Campaign, along with his decision to move his protests to the North, alarmed some of his former white supporters. His impatience with his own earlier optimism seemed to grow sharper toward the end of his life.

But all of this points to another complexity that needs to be recovered. King's sorrow and his bitterness at America's failures of justice were themes he explored throughout his life. Five year before his death, at the March on Washington, he had expressed this anger, along with his abiding hope for the future. Any schoolchild can quote the most famous line of the speech he gave that day: "I have a dream." And that soaring and reiterated declaration has properly etched itself indelibly into the American imagination.

But in lines less often quoted, perhaps because they were more disturbing, King also said: "We have come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of the Republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check; a check which has come back marked 'insufficient funds.'"

King was an idealist, but he was also clear-eyed.

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The country and the world have changed in profound ways over the three decades since Martin Luther King Jr.'s death, and at least some of the changes have their sources in his life and work. We need to acknowledge that, whatever business remains unfinished, King won many of the battles he set out to fight. Through his actions, and through his imperishable rhetoric, he compelled white America to engage the idea and the implications of equality with unprecedented seriousness.

In essays like this one, writers are always tempted to ask what Dr. King would have to say about the great issues of our time if he were alive today. We have succumbed to that temptation.

While the details of his positions are disputable, we are confident that King would be articulating the principles that were most closely tied to justice and equality, and we are also quite sure that he would never seek the safe ground. To those of us who spend our lives in schools and colleges, he might repeat something that he actually said: "Education without direction is a one-sided social value. Direct action without education is a meaningless expression of pure energy."

Above all, Dr. King would call every one of us to take his place -- not to wait for his re-appearance. Leadership, he would remind us, is a collective responsibility.

Peter Conn is a professor of English and deputy provost of the University.

Steven Conn is associate professor of History at Ohio State University and deputy provost of the University.

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