King's Dream

WASHINGTON -- As word spread of Martin Luther King's death on that calamitous April day in 1968, so too did speculation as to what his legacy would be. Would his dream resonate through the ages? Or fade into oblivion like a once-popular tune?

The early victories on his home turf in the Deep South had given way to sputtering and quixotic campaigns elsewhere, when unfamiliar terrain often shifted in disturbing and surprising ways. In Memphis, violence had broken out for the first time on a march that King led, the FBI's harassment had continued to intensify, and dissension roiled King's camp.

The years immediately following his assassination also seemed a referendum on the entire era in which King came of age and rose to fame: Cautious optimism and patient appeals to conscience were supplanted by desperation and destruction; prayers and peaceful demonstrations seemed all but abandoned to more incendiary combinations, such as matches and gasoline.

King's dream certainly didn't die with him. The emergent black middle class picked it up and ran with it, as far away from the inner cities as they could get. The difficulties of those left behind tragically resemble the conditions that loomed during King's forays into Memphis and Chicago. They also suggest a conundrum that the African-American communities' most able strivers often have seemed to avoid in recent years: the responsibility of successful blacks to their less fortunate brethren.

Now the word "brethren" and its suggestion of family ties and mutual affection seems outdated. In the years leading up to the civil rights movement, even accommodationists agreed that a collective American-American progress -- not mere individual advancement -- should be our goal, with compassion and charity toward all. For instance, while ambitious blacks had scoffed at many of Booker T. Washington's timid pronouncements, few questioned him when he urged, "If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else."

Although responsibility for the dispossessed was very much a part of King's message, his fiercest critics assailed his own appetite for the good life, his fondness for silk pajamas and his early reluctance to go to jail. Some members of SNCC mocked him as "too middle class" and accused him of being "too bourgeois."

It is true that King's early life was privileged compared to most of his Southern black peers. Although his earliest memories of Depression-era Atlanta included seeing long lines of black men waiting in bread lines, he was always well-fed. At Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala., where King took over the pulpit in 1954, his brilliant predecessor Vernon Johns had often taken his complacent congregation to task for being too conservative and snobbish. He even coined a term for such folk: "spinksterinkdum Negroes."

In truth, they were barely spitting distance from humbler beginnings, and King knew that as well as anyone. His father, himself a prominent and well-compensated clergyman, had been a sharecropper's son with little schooling to speak of. He left a poor, violence-ridden home at 14 and didn't return to school until age 20. He worked a series of night jobs while spending his days in a classroom alongside small children, mastering the basics of literacy. Eventually Martin Luther King Sr. rescued a debt-ridden church and built its membership from 200 to 4,000.

Sometimes I wonder if the average undereducated young man of today could muster the willpower needed to duplicate the elder King's ambitious labors. Sometimes I wonder if each subsequent generation of black men is somehow weaker and less motivated than the one before it. But, like the typical American, I am prone to distraction by the glare of the headlines.

I can look around my workplace and see that more black men are doing well than ever before. But I need look no farther than the expansive groups huddling on street corners near my home to recognize that more black men are also doing worse than ever before.

Vernon Johns, as eloquent as King, denounced anyone who didn't "thrill with joy when the least of men begin to pull in the direction of the stars." Among the unemployed, the uneducated -- and yes, the shiftless too -- the stars have become too distant to dream of, let alone follow. Thirty-eight years later, King's vision of a just society remains as compelling as ever. But dreaming increasingly seems a luxury available only to a few.