Updating King's Dream: Love as a Weapon

If he had survived to turn 81 today, what would Martin Luther King have made of an America in which the racial barrier to the White House has been overcome only to be followed a year later by hatreds and division throughout the nation?

In his dream for America, there was not only justice and equality but universal respect and love. "In the process of gaining our rightful place," Dr. King said at the Lincoln Memorial, "we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds….we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force."

From the start in 1955, he was exceptional--a 26-year-old minister leading a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama. He was harassed and arrested, a bomb exploded on his porch, but he rejected violence. “If we are trampled over every day,” he told his followers, “don’t ever let anyone pull you so low as to hate him. We must use the weapon of love.”

After reading this, I sent a reporter, William Peters, to Montgomery and, seven months later, while the boycott was still on, Redbook published the first national profile of Dr. King under the title, “Our Weapon Is Love.”

Months later, the Supreme Court struck down the Montgomery bus-segregation law, and the young minister was on his way to becoming the leader of a national movement.

In protests throughout the South, using nonviolence, King drew the support of whites as well as blacks. Like John F. Kennedy, he was a man of his time who understood the emerging importance of television. Unlike Kennedy, he went beyond words and used the full power of body rhetoric. He planned marches to elicit images of brutality against his people——guns, clubs, police dogs and high—pressure fire hoses——for the evening news.

A decade later, when I asked him to contribute to a Christmas issue of McCalls, Dr. King wrote not about himself but about the apartment he had rented in Chicago’s slums to connect with gang members: “I was shocked at the venom they poured out against the world.”

He had asked them to join Mississippi Freedom Marches, and they did in carloads, where “they were to be attacked by tear gas. They were to protect women and children with no other weapons but their own bodies…..

“They learned in Mississippi and returned to teach in Chicago the beautiful lesson of acting against evil by renouncing force...

“And in Chicago the test was sterner. These marchers endured not only the filthiest kind of verbal abuse but also barrages of rocks and sticks and eggs and cherry bombs...

“It was through the Chicago marches that our promise to them—that nonviolence achieves results--was redeemed and their hopes for a better life rekindled, For they saw that a humane police force, in contrast to police in Mississippi, could defend the exercise of Constitutional rights as well as enforce the law in the ghetto.”

Almost half a century later, a young man from those Chicago streets is in the White House and, as he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, Barack Obama acknowledged the ironies of his connection to Martin Luther King as he defended the "just wars" over which he is presiding: "As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King's life work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there's nothing weak--nothing passive, nothing naïve--in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King."

If he were still alive, Martin Luther King would be a rebuke to Obama, and us all, for failing to create a world of justice and compassion. He certainly would be no Billy Graham or Rick Warren, ministering to the mighty and basking in their glow, although he might have agreed to deliver the benediction at Obama's inaugural with the sentiments that his contemporary Joseph Lowery expressed:

"Yes, we can work together to achieve a more perfect union. And while we have sown the seeds of greed--the wind of greed and corruption, and even as we reap the whirlwind of social and economic disruption, we seek forgiveness and we come in a spirit of unity and solidarity to commit our support to our president by our willingness to make sacrifices, to respect your creation, to turn to each other and not on each other."

A Hero Close to Home

"CNN's Heroes" confers fame on so-called ordinary people reaching out to help others in extraordinary ways, this weekend a 57-year-old suburban single mother named Pam Koner who, inspired by a newspaper picture of a hungry child, started a network of 600 sponsors to provide families in 13 communities across the country with over 800,000 meals and counting.

My admiration for Pam Koner is intensified by knowing her since childhood as the daughter of close friends--Marvin Koner, a brilliant photographer (his picture of Martin Luther King and his family is on the wall next to me as I write this), and his widow Silvia, a large-hearted woman with a gift for caring and friendship who, when I turned 50, gave me my first party on the birthday I shared with her husband.

The news about Pam is a temptation to revive the old saying about the apple not falling far from the tree in an era that recalls the Great Depression, when the unemployed were reduced to selling apples on street corners to survive.

Martin Luther King's Gift to Obama

He has been gone now for more years than he lived but, on the birthday we celebrate today, Martin Luther King Jr. would have been only 80 years old.

Michelle and Barack Obama are doing community service in his honor and urging all Americans to do the same. In more ways than one, the inauguration of an African-American president tomorrow is part of his legacy.

Martin Luther King preached nonviolence to the oppressed. “Our weapon is love,” he told them, and he used it with stunning force.

At the dawn of TV, he brought into American homes images of peaceful Southern protesters beaten, driven with high-pressure hoses and arrested without fighting back. Their body rhetoric exposed racial hatred as never before.

Then, in 1966 Dr. King wrote for me about the apartment he had rented in Chicago’s slums to connect with gang members: “I was shocked at the venom they poured out against the world.”

He asked them to join Freedom Marches in Mississippi and they did in carloads, where “they were to be attacked by tear gas. They were to protect women and children with no other weapons but their own bodies...

“They learned in Mississippi and returned to teach in Chicago the beautiful lesson of acting against evil by renouncing force...

“And in Chicago the test was sterner. These marchers endured not only the filthiest kind of verbal abuse but also barrages of rocks and sticks and eggs and cherry bombs...

“It was through the Chicago marches that our promise to them—that nonviolence achieves results--was redeemed and their hopes for a better life rekindled, For they saw that a humane police force, in contrast to police in Mississippi, could defend the exercise of Constitutional rights as well as enforce the law in the ghetto.”

Some of those young men Martin Luther King helped to grow up and away from their worst selves to exercise their civil rights must have been among the millions of Americans of all races to vote for Barack Obama in November.

We celebrate his birthday today, but tomorrow will be the fulfillment of Martin Luther King's dream.

Two Nights in an American Park

Whatever else 2008 was, it was not a slow news year: the longest election campaign ever, a worldwide economic meltdown, natural disasters, scandals large and small filled media to the brim.

But one image belongs to a history that will be passed down through generations forever and lifts the heart for whatever the years ahead may bring--Grant Park, Chicago, the night of November 4th.

A quarter of a million faces radiated the joy of renewal, a burden lifted, a dream realized, a hope brought to life--not by the man who stood before them but by the American people themselves.

"If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible," Barack Obama said that night, "who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer."

Those faces stay in the memory of someone who had a far different experience in that place 40 years earlier, on a night where the world saw a different answer to the question about "the power of our democracy."

On TV screens back then, Americans were watching kids being gassed, clubbed and herded into police vans at gunpoint for exercising their freedom of speech while at the Democratic convention, Walter Cronkite was looking at the footage and telling TV viewers in disgust, "It makes us want to pack up our cameras and go home."

Those two nights in Grant Park are both part of the American story in a single lifetime, and as 2009 begins, we know there will be other nights and other scenes, some inspiring and some ugly, but it's possible to believe the new president when he quotes Martin Luther King to say that "the arc of the universe is long but it bends toward justice."

Obama's Prose and Poetry

The venue for tonight's historic speech may be a mistake, reinforcing Barack Obama's image as a rock star at a time when he has to make a reassuringly intimate connection with voters who will be bombarded by Republican attacks on him as too exotic to trust.

On the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" oration, Obama is the embodiment of that dream come true. What Americans will want to hear now are not more visions but concrete plans to wake their country from eight years of the Bush-Cheney nightmare.

As gifted a speaker as he is, Obama may find a way to reach those millions with realistic proposals and inspire them at the same time, but the balance of prose and poetry will be exquisitely difficult to find as tens of thousands embrace him as the symbol of their hopes and, yes, their dreams.

The doubters and detractors will be ready to pounce on his words and twist them into sound bites for toxic commercials, but tonight will be the start of a test of American democracy that, for the sake of future generations, Obama must not fail. The prose will have to match the poetry.

A Look Into Obama's Mind

In unearthing the syllabus and assignments for his seminar in "Current Issues in Racism and the Law" during 12 years of teaching at the University of Chicago, the New York Times offers a preview of how Barack Obama's mind might work in the Oval Office.

For that complex and controversial subject, Obama improvised his own textbook, with key cases like Brown v. Board of Education, and essays by Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Dubois and Malcolm X as well as conservative thinkers like Robert H. Bork.

Amid the historical horrors of slavery and lynchings, students recall, Obama made room for discussing the values and culture that Americans of all races grow up sharing, citing his wife, Michelle, a black woman, who loved “The Brady Bunch” so much that she could identify every episode by its opening scenes.

But perhaps most to the point of how a President Obama would conduct his administration's approach to problem solving may be found in his instructions to students for preparing their term papers:

"What I want to see is that you are fully engaged with an issue, and that you've broken some sweat trying to figure out the problem in all it wonderful complexity.

"More specifically, I'll be looking for: a focused, tightly crafted argument, and analytic rigor in working through the legal or policy problems raised by your argument; a thorough examination of the diversity of opinion that exists on the issue or theme; a willingness, after having looked at the various facets of the topic, to take a stand and offer concrete proposals or approaches to the problem."

That sounds like the essence of what he would telling the people he picks to help him run the country. It certainly would be a change from what we have now.

Johnny Cash Comes Back to Life

A London gallery next week will show pictures of an American legend, some of them unseen for almost half a century. Taken by my friend Marvin Koner, they show, not the familiar man in black with a life-scarred face, but a smooth-skinned 27-year-old at the brink of a career that would sear his voice and music into America's memory.

Koner was one of the young men who came back from World War II to pioneer an era of available-light photography that transformed pictures in magazines from frozen images with studio lighting to exciting depictions of life in motion, just as movies were moving from Hollywood sound stages to the grainy reality of Italian Neorealism and the French Nouvelle Vague.

In their work, the 1950s and 1960s still live. A slide show on Koner's website brings back Martin Luther King, JFK, Robert Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Elizabeth Taylor and unremembered people of the era through the eyes of a man with a 35mm camera and an artist's sensibility,

The pictures of Johnny Cash, discovered in a closet after more than 40 years, are part of that lost-and-found-again world that a new generation can rediscover now and marvel at how young and alive historical figures once were.

"Because He's Black"

With Hillary Clinton's chances fading, the issue of race is boiling to the surface, as it did in West Virginia and will again in Kentucky tomorrow.

Last night on PBS, Bill Moyers quoted one of last week's voters telling a BBC interviewer why Barack Obama can't win the White House: "Because he's black."

"There it was," Moyers pointed out, "no longer a whisper but out in public, on the record: Because he is black. The fault line in American history is now a dividing line in this election...We heard it all week and now the political world is asking: Could the candidate who has won more votes, more states and more delegates lose in November and could the reason be race?"

Ugly as the question is, it will be asked and answered between now and November, but what it says about America, regardless of whether Obama wins or loses, is something we all need to know.

How deep does the prejudice go? As he loses two border states, Obama drew 75,000 people in Oregon yesterday, a huge crowd that brings back visual memories of Martin Luther King in Washington over 40 years ago making his "I have a dream" speech.

The New York Times reports Obama's reaction: “Wow! Wow! Wow!” were his first words as he surveyed the multitude, which included people in kayaks and small pleasure craft on the river on an unseasonably hot day in Oregon.

"It is 'fair to say this is the most spectacular setting for the most spectacular crowd' of his campaign, he told the audience."

Obama is living out King's dream this year, but how will it end? In a replay of yesterday's heartening spectacle or as a nightmare in the darkest part of the American heart silently voting its fears and prejudices in the solitude of ballot boxes in November?

Wright's Jeremiads

Bill Moyers did his best last night on PBS to put Barack Obama's controversial pastor into perspective. He succeeded in showing the man's brilliance but created unease in an observer who, by taste and temperament, is not attracted to apocalyptic preaching about the human condition.

From the interview, it's easy to see what Obama found in Jeremiah Wright and his church that gave a new dimension to his secular desire to help the poor and dispossessed during his early days in Chicago.

Wright's church apparently did and does good work in uplifting its community, but the social benefits come with a moral price--the preacher's selective view of good and evil in the political world.

Consider Wright's use of Martin Luther King to justify his own history. "Dr. King, of course, was vilified," he told Moyers, asserting that, after King talked about racism, militarism and capitalism, he was "ostracized not only by the majority of Americans in the press; he got vilified by his own community. They thought he had overstepped his bounds...He was vilified by all of the Negro leaders who felt he'd overstepped his bounds talking about an unjust war."

Martin Luther King's opposition to the war made him unpopular with Lyndon Johnson but not the rest of America, least of all African-Americans and, unlike Wright, he did not use it to condemn all of American history, from the mistreatment of Native Americans to plotting drug addiction in black communities.

The Rev. Wright's need to "damn" America leads him to a peculiar view of history. He goes back centuries to mine our national past for evil but, when asked about Louis Farrakhan's racist and anti-Semitic speech, dismisses it with "That was twenty years ago" and praises him for getting African-Americans off drugs and giving them self-respect.

Perhaps most troubling of all is his smiling intimation that Barack Obama is only distancing himself from his views for political expedience: "(W)hat happened in Philadelphia where he had to respond to the sound bites, he responded as a politician. But he did not disown me because I'm a pastor."

Two Little White Girls

Barack Obama ended his speech with the story of a young white woman who worked for his South Carolina campaign.

In a discussion of why they were there, Ashley Baia told volunteers that when she was nine years old, her mother was stricken with cancer, lost her health care and had to file for bankruptcy and that she "convinced her mother that what she really liked and really wanted to eat more than anything else was mustard and relish sandwiches. Because that was the cheapest way to eat.

"She did this for a year until her mom got better," Obama said, "and she told everyone at the round table that the reason she joined our campaign was so that she could help the millions of other children in the country who want and need to help their parents too."

When it was the turn of an elderly black man to explain why he was there, he answered, "I'm here because of Ashley."

That experience typified his campaign, Obama said: “'I’m here because of Ashley.' By itself, that single moment of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man is not enough...But it is where we start. It is where our union grows stronger."

Obama had told that story when he spoke at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta on Martin Luther King's birthday and, for an older observer, it resonates with the story Dr. King told in his last speech in Memphis the night before he died.

After being stabbed by a demented woman in Harlem, he had received a letter: "Dear Dr. King: I am a ninth-grade student at the White Plains High School. While it should not matter, I would like to mention that I am a white girl. I read in the paper of your misfortune, and of your suffering. And I read that if you had sneezed, you would have died. And I'm simply writing you to say that I'm so happy that you didn't sneeze."

In leading up to his "I've been to the mountain top" peroration, Martin Luther King said:

"And I want to say tonight, I want to say that I am happy that I didn't sneeze. Because if I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been around here in 1960, when students all over the South started sitting-in at lunch counters. And I knew that as they were sitting in, they were really standing up for the best in the American dream. And taking the whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

"If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been around in 1962, when Negroes in Albany, Georgia, decided to straighten their backs up. And whenever men and women straighten their backs up, they are going somewhere, because a man can't ride your back unless it is bent.

"If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been here in 1963, when the black people of Birmingham, Alabama, aroused the conscience of this nation, and brought into being the Civil Rights Bill. If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have had a chance later that year, in August, to try to tell America about a dream that I had had. If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been down in Selma, Alabama, been in Memphis to see the community rally around those brothers and sisters who are suffering. I'm so happy that I didn't sneeze."

Two stories. Two little white girls. Two African-American men. Two moments of connection half a century apart. One American dream.

Testing the Power of "Just Words"

Until the ugliness started this month, race and gender were benign issues, at least on the surface, of the Democratic contest as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama congratulated themselves and each other for breaking through barriers of prejudice in American life.

But centuries of oppression, hatred and anger are not so easily wiped out by symbolic candidacies, and Obama is making the speech of his political life today to repair the damage to his campaign by the furor over the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who wears dashikis and does not speak softly.

In his first response last week, Obama invoked Robert Kennedy's plea for racial unity after the murder of Martin Luther King, as he no doubt will again today, under the influence of Ted Sorensen, who saw first-hand the violence of the 1960s and emerged as a soft-spoken liberal corporate lawyer.

But Wright and Sorensen reflect more than Obama's mixed racial heritage and the generational gap between their lives and his own. Below the surface of race (and gender) are internal strains of economic class and culture that are not easily resolved.

In the 1960s, Black Power advocates and the Black Panthers were pitted against Dr. King's message of non-violence and reconciliation, just as the Women's Movement was riven by a divide between radical Feminists, college-educated and privileged, and working women who resented "Women's Lib," even as they benefited from the political consciousness it raised. The victims of prejudice are no more monolithic than those who practice and profit from it.

Obama will try to bridge those gaps and more as he is put to the severe test of reaching beyond rhetoric into the hearts of voters with both hopes and fears about the change he represents. At the very least, the results will show how much "just words" matter in American life.

Will Glib Be Good Enough?

Sooner rather than later (see below), Barack Obama has had to confront his twin albatrosses, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and the decidedly secular Tony Rezko. In his rounds of the cable news shows last night, Obama was articulate, as always, but for the first time, glib bordering on shifty.

On Countdown with a deferential Keith Olbermann, he distanced himself from Wright's racist rants but asked voters to believe that, in 17 years of churchgoing, he did not hear any of the venom or he would have condemned it.

Even more tenuous was Obama's attempt to paint Wright as a spiritual leader caught up in the anger of his generation at racial injustice, a pissed-off Martin Luther King, if you will. That won't wash with those who remember how King stressed rejection of such attitudes at a time when Black Power advocates were promoting them. Senator, Wright is no Martin Luther King. Not even close.

In his attempt to "disgorge" Rezko, along with his campaign contributions, Obama stressed that he has not been accused of any wrongdoing or connected to any of the issues involved in the current federal corruption trial, but his opponents won't be deterred from harping on their long, close association, including the buying of the Obamas' Chicago home.

Obama's most fervent admirers will be tempted to pass off these iffy relationships as part of a misguided search for substitute fathers by a man who lost his own at an early age, and there may be truth in that. But Obama is now attempting to become the national father figure, and just asking him to show better judgment than George W. Bush would be setting the bar very low.

What a Difference a Year Makes

Last March 4th, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, arms linked with civil rights leaders, were reenacting the 1965 march in Selma, united in declaring their debt to the non-violence of Martin Luther King. Today, they are at the precipice of divisions that could be suicidal for their party in November.

In Obama's grasp for the nomination and Clinton's last stand in Texas and Ohio, identity politics are threatening to tear the Democrats apart--accusations against him of Farrakhan sympathies to unnerve Jewish voters, paired with countercharges that the Clinton campaign is fueling them by distributing a photo of Obama in Muslim garb. Voters are being targeted by race, gender, ethnicity, economic status and any other demographic that could prejudice them

Last March, Hillary Clinton was telling worshippers at Selma's First Baptist Church that the Civil Rights Act of 1965 today "is giving Senator Obama the chance to run for president. And by its logic and spirit...yes, it is giving me that chance.”

Before the march, Obama praised both Clintons and said of the coming political campaign, “We don’t have time for other folks to divide us.”

But the conventional wisdom of inciting demographic splits among voters has overrun those promises to bring them together in rejecting the extremes of the Bush era and attract Democrats of all stripes, along with Independents and disillusioned moderate Republicans.

Tomorrow should be the tipping point. With those critical primary prizes in the balance, will the results mark an end to the divisiveness or fuel continuing contention to give John McCain, against all logic, a chance to enter the White House as Bush Lite?

W. C. Heinz

The man who died today at the age of 93 wrote about courage and grace under pressure better than anyone of his time.

Bill Heinz was idealized by generations of writers who in the new millennium were still reading his books, articles and collected columns.

We met when I edited a piece of his about Lew Jenkins, a Depression kid from Texas who fought his way up to lightweight champion and then lost everything, breaking his body in motorcycle and car crashes and coming into the ring hurt and drunk.

Bill ran into him during World War II when the former champion was in the Coast Guard landing invasion troops and later after he won a Silver Star as a foot soldier in Korea at the age of 36. The article was the best I worked on during my time at Argosy, a picture of a man who knew how to fight but not how to live with what is called success.

In 1958, Bill wrote a piece for me at Redbook about a young boxer who killed his first opponent in the ring. His novel, "The Professional," had just been published to good reviews, but some critics and readers were put off by the ending. The hero does everything right but loses the big fight in a quirk of fate and then learns to live with it. Fight stories are not supposed to reflect a tragic sense of life.

Ernest Hemingway called it the only good novel about a boxer he had ever read. But what mattered to Bill most did not get into the blurbs. It was the only time I saw him allow himself a moment of pride as he told me:

"Hemingway said he knew it had to end the way it did, but when he got to the last chapter, he threw the book across the room."

Bill Heinz's subject was grace under pressure. He wrote about football coach Vince Lombardi, surgeons in the operating room and Martin Luther King's march on Selma. Along the way, he did a little book about a trauma unit in Korea called "MASH."

Michelle Obama's Pride

Those who were perplexed, annoyed and/or enraged by Mrs. Obama's statement that "for the first time in my adult life I'm proud of America" may want to take a look at HBO's contribution tonight to Black History Month, a documentary about Joe Louis.

Called, without irony, "a credit to his race," the heavyweight champion was exalted in 1938 for beating the exemplar of Nazi Germany, Max Schmeling, but never accepted as a true American. Decades later, when playing golf in San Diego, he found excrement in the first hole.

As a white child growing up in the Harlem ghetto, I saw how little of the pride that Michelle Obama now feels was within reach of its black residents. Movie placards in store windows would read "Gone With the Wind with Hattie McDaniel and Butterfly McQueen," followed in smaller type by "Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh."

In World War II, I was greeted by glares for sitting in the back of a bus in Charleston, South Carolina, and only my uniform spared me from more physical reactions by white riders.

In the 1950s, it took a Supreme Court desegregation decision to let children who looked like Michelle Obama go to school with those who didn't and, in the years afterward, they were beaten in the streets for marching with Martin Luther King for the audacity of wanting to exercise their right to vote.

In 1985, in her senior thesis, the future Mrs. Obama wrote, "My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my 'blackness' than ever before. I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don't belong...it often seems as if, to them, I will always be black first and a student second."

Now millions of Americans of all races are voting to make Barack Obama their president. His wife's pride is understandable, and those who attack her manner of expressing it would do well to recall its origins and examine their own motives.

Martin Luther King's Last Speech

On April 3, 1968, the night before he died, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke in a Memphis church and concluded with these words:

"Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!

"And so I'm happy tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!"

His foreboding was more than rhetoric. A decade later in an article I published, his father wrote that Dr. King had visited him weeks before to prepare his parents for the possibility he would be killed.

“The reports are that they are out to get me,” he told them. “I have to go on with my work, I’m too deeply involved now to get out, it’s all too important. Sometimes I want to stop. Just go away somewhere and have some quiet days, finally, a quiet life with Coretta and the children. But it’s too late for that now. I have my path before me. I know what I have to do.”

The man whose life we celebrate today gave it up for a vision of better lives for generations to come.

Martin Luther King to Obama

The following was originally posted a year ago today, January 14, 2007.

West Side residents of Chicago now have a U.S. Senator who looks like them and it may be, in more ways than one, due to the man whose birthday we celebrate tomorrow.

Martin Luther King Jr. preached nonviolence to the oppressed. “Our weapon is love,” he told them, and he used it with stunning force.

At the dawn of TV, he brought into American homes images of peaceful Southern protesters beaten, driven with high-pressure hoses and arrested without fighting back. Their body rhetoric exposed racial hatred as never before.

Then, in 1966 Dr. King wrote for me about the apartment he had rented in Chicago’s slums to connect with gang members: “I was shocked at the venom they poured out against the world.”

He asked them to join Freedom Marches in Mississippi and they did in carloads, where “they were to be attacked by tear gas. They were to protect women and children with no other weapons but their own bodies…..

“They learned in Mississippi and returned to teach in Chicago the beautiful lesson of acting against evil by renouncing force...

“And in Chicago the test was sterner. These marchers endured not only the filthiest kind of verbal abuse but also barrages of rocks and sticks and eggs and cherry bombs...

“It was through the Chicago marches that our promise to them—that nonviolence achieves results--was redeemed and their hopes for a better life rekindled, For they saw that a humane police force, in contrast to police in Mississippi, could defend the exercise of Constitutional rights as well as enforce the law in the ghetto.”

It is not hard to believe that some of those young men Martin Luther King helped to grow up and away from their worst selves exercised their rights decades later in voting for Barack Obama.

Clinton, Obama and Martin Luther King

In the week before his 79th birthday tomorrow, Martin Luther King was in the news again.

To make a point about the difference between rhetoric and reality, between Barack Obama and herself, Hillary Clinton said, "“Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It took a president to get it done.”

That December, after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, Dr. King went to the White House, where President Johnson told him he that, if he tried to pass a voting rights bill, Southerners in Congress would block other measures of his Great Society program, which would benefit his people in important ways.

"The President said nothing could be done," Dr. King recalled. "But we started a movement."

Three months later, in Selma, Alabama, on what became known as Bloody Sunday, police beat peaceful protesters on a bridge, and days afterward Lyndon Johnson made a speech to a joint session of Congress that Martin Luther King called "one of the most eloquent, unequivocal, and passionate pleas for human rights ever made by a President of the United States."

"Our struggle in Selma had brought the whole issue of the right to vote to the attention of the nation," King said. "Selma brought us a voting bill...We had a federal law which could be used, and use it we would. Where it fell short, we had our tradition of struggle and the method of nonviolent direct action, and these too we would use."

On his birthday tomorrow, Americans will not have to choose between Martin Luther King and Lyndon Johnson in remembering that achievement. Both played their parts, as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are playing theirs in another historic turning point in American life. When voters cast their ballots for either of them, they will be making statements as powerful as Dr. King and President Johnson did back then.

The Winner Is...Change

Instead of screaming, as he did after his third-place finish as a candidate in 2004, Howard Dean was in Iowa last night as his party's chairman beaming at a huge turnout that bodes well for Democrats' chances in November.

Dean's parochial delight is understandable, but the decisive Obama and Huckabee victories have a larger meaning--that voters are so hungry for change they are willing to entrust the future to the least-tested candidates in their parties rather than those with much more accumulated political experience, power and insider backing.

Both winners have George Bush to thank for that, but it may be a mixed blessing as they continue down the road toward nomination. When the exhilaration subsides, they will be tasked to deliver a detailed picture of their visions for the change they promise and challenged to defend its plausibility.

Huckabee's victory speech struck notes of caring and inclusiveness that Republicans badly need, while Obama rose to a new emotional pitch with echoes of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy in promises to end political polarization, social divisions and a misbegotten war.

With all the messiness of its process, Iowa has spoken clearly in making the first statement of this political year. Next week New Hampshire and next month le deluge.