In 1983 Ronald Reagan signed a bill that designated Martin Luther King Day as a federal holiday. The great-grandson of slaves joined just three others – Christopher Columbus, George Washington and Jesus Christ – in having his birthday so commemorated. High schools and boulevards across the United States of America now bear his name. What has been acknowledged as the most eloquent and powerful political speech of the 20th century, delivered at the age of 34 before a gathering of 300,000 at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, has been sold by the million in books and recordings of every kind.
He was honoured with the Nobel Peace Prize. He was also humiliated and incarcerated and the target of bullets and bombs. Godfrey Hodgson’s biography, probably the finest and most penetrating to appear in years, provides an extraordinary insight into this remarkable modern day Christian prophet.
It was the arrest of Rosa Parks for refusing to vacate her bus seat for a white man in Montgomery in December 1955 that propelled King to national attention. The youthful pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church called a mass meeting to protest the arrest and emerged as a protagonist in the boycott of Montgomery buses. Their demands could not have been more modest. An end to rudeness by drivers, employment of blacks by the bus company and seating on the basis of first come, first served.
Racists responded with bombings and lynchings. King was arrested and convicted of conspiracy to boycott the bus service. The subsequent declaration of Alabama’s segregationist laws as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court led him to appreciate the power of non-violent resistance. A refusal to serve black students at a diner in North Carolina led to a second wave of protests. King was again arrested, this time for loitering. The image of the stylishly dressed, Harvard-educated pastor being addressed as “boy” and manhandled by police moved John F Kennedy to telephone Correta King to express his solidarity. Hodgson observes that the call converted the Republican loyalties of some Southern blacks able to vote and probably helped Kennedy to win the tight 1960 presidential election.
Hodgson is highly critical of the Kennedy administration’s policy on race. JFK’s inaugural address was devoted to the threat of communism and remained silent on racial inequality. He declined to use the federal government and army, opting instead for negotiation with racist Southern governors. Hodgson contends that Kennedy failed to appreciate the “emotional and historical resonances of the struggle”. The brutal suppression and exclusion of blacks from American society was equated with the social snubs experienced by the president’s Irish ancestors. The administration appears to have been influenced by malign misinformation about King emanating from J Edgar Hoover and the FBI, alleging everything from financial dishonesty to sexual deviancy and subservience to communism.
In May 1963 the New York Times published a photograph, subsequently syndicated around the world, of a police officer in Birmingham unleashing a German shepherd on a defenceless young black. The world was sickened at the sight of mounted policemen bludgeoning peaceful protesters, including schoolchildren, and revolted by the spectacle of Southern hospitals turning the wounded away. Liberal-left opinion was appalled at the way the apparatus of power in the South, including every level of law enforcement and government, appeared to sustain an abhorrent system of racial supremacy. It was King who articulated the opposition to this injustice.
His Letter from Birmingham Jail remains one of the most passionate and evocative pieces of prose ever written. Addressed to his fellow clergymen, King defended his presence in Birmingham because “injustice is here”. He contrasted the nations of Africa and Asia moving with jet like speed to independence while “we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter”. He warned “there comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair” and denounced the “white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice, who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice”.
Lyndon B Johnson, to the surprise of liberals who assumed that, because of his association with Southern grandees, he would be more conservative than Kennedy, made racial equality his priority. Hubert Humphrey’s remark that more hotels in the South would accept dogs than blacks persuaded Congress to enact the Civil Rights Act and make racial segregation unlawful.
King shifted the struggle from de jure legal equality in the South to de facto economic equality in the North. He took on Richard Daley, the ruthless Mayor of Chicago, whose idea of affirmative action was “nine Irishmen and a Swede”, and led a campaign to desegregate public housing, ensure the hiring of more black people and end police brutality in the city.
Hodgson also charts King’s opposition to the Vietnam war, culminating in his eloquent denunciation of a government sending young black men 8,000 miles to guarantee liberties in South East Asia which they could not find in Georgia and Harlem.
