The Galveston Daily News from Galveston, Texas • Page 6

O-A fJatltj Ntuis Monday Morning, January 20,1986 Historians: remember the man, but also the movement ntiftPDfkD All H.fCDriG' iiT.t- i 11 By DEBORAH MESCE Associated Press Writer WASHINGTON As Americans honor the memory of Martin Luther King some historians worry that more attention is being focused on King the man and martyr thanon the movement. "King himself, were he alive today, would be more insistent than anyone that any celebration should be a celebration of the civil rights movement rather than him alone," said David J. Garrow, associate professor of political science at City College of New York and City University Graduate Center. Garrow, whose third book about King is to be published soon, and other historians caution that the black leader is being elevated to the level of a "super-human being," an embodiment of the entire civil rights movement. "King is being mythologized.

He's being made an important figure outside his historical said Ira Berlin, a history professor at the University of Maryland and with an expertise in slavery and emancipation. "It's hard to say where that's going to go," he said, but added that "some are uncomfortable with his removal from historical events." "King has become a representative of the movement as a whole," when in fact the struggle was fractious and divided among different ideas, he said. "King was an important part of that (movement) and he had extraordinary talent, but he was part of that not the whole." Darlene Clark Hine, vice provost and history professor at Purdue University, said King will be remembered as one of the greatest black leaders in American history. But it's critical that the movement for racial equality not be lost in his shadow, said Ms. Hine, an expert in Afro-American history.

"While his role was pivotal, it's important to keep in mind that the civil rights movement is 120 years old," she said, dating the struggle to 1865, the end of the Civil War. Others say its origins stretch back to Colonial times. But some of King's supporters are ambivalent about the emphasis because they fought so hard to have his birthday recognized as a national holiday only the second such designation for any American. Within days of King's assassination on April 4, 1968, a bill was introduced in Congress seeking to have his birthday, Jan. 15, designated a national holiday.

Fifteen years later, President Reagan signed into law legislation establishing the holiday on the third Monday in January, this year Jan. 20. Clayborne Carson, an associate professor of history at Stanford University and editor of a collection of King's personal papers, speeches and writings, calls King's work "one of the great movements of world history." He sees no danger that emphasis on King as a hero will supplant the importance of the civil rights movement "any more than celebrating George Washington's birthday would give the impression that he fought the Revolution by himself. "Great people in history are most often the symbols of greater forces beyond themselves, and I think this is the case" with King, he said. But Garrow believes a danger in immortalizing King is that "it gives people an excessively simplistic understanding of history and conveys implicitly if not explicitly that social movements and political change depend on great individuals for their success.

"King himself believed very strongly that if he had not existed, somebody else would have emerged as a similar spokesman and symbol," Garrow said. Raised to the level of sainthood, King becomes a "whitewashed" figure, "rather than a politically challenging man whose message still has very real present-day relevance," he said. King's life becomes more significant viewed against the backdrop of the civil rights movement, Berlin said. "It's only as seeing him as part of the larger movement that King really gains his true significance and his special genius was his ability to articulate what so many people were willing to act upon at that particular time in history." King's non-violent campaign of demonstrations and marches throughout the South in the 1950s and 1960s spurred the passage of legislation ending official segregation. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.

Viewing King as a national icon sets him up for "debunking," Berlin said, and information gathered at the direction of former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover has provided a number of avenues for critics. Most historians believe, however, that disclosures about King's private life will not diminish his status in American history. "I think the point that most major American political figures have not been monogamous is old news to virtually everyone," Garrow said. Seeming contradictions between the public and private lives of national leaders are many.

Thomas Jefferson, one of the authors of the Declaration of Independence decreeing that "all men are created equal," was a slaveowner. Some say Abraham Lincoln, the great emancipator, was racist. And extra-marital affairs are attributed to numerous presidents, most recently John F. Kennedy. But "history has a way of dealing with heroes fairly (because) their values are so timeless," noted Nathan Huggins, a professor of history and Afro-American studies at Harvard University.

"Heroes are what they are because they allow us to invest in them the values which are ours, and we can use the person as a means of being the symbol of our aspirations, values and needs," Huggins said. As with many national heroes, death is their making. King's assassination, as he stood on the balcony of a Memphis, motel, erased much of the controversy of his latter years of life, many of the experts say. During most of the" King had focused the civil rights movement on the struggle of blacks to gain equality. But by the time he died, he had become an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War and he was defining the black struggle in economic terms.

"King was moving in a direction See KING Page "A King children deal With father's legacy ATLANTA (API Vnlanrfn i Monday Morning, January 20,1986 Ollje (Salueaton Satlo 7-A ATLANTA (AP) Yolanda King was 12 years old when her mother told her that her father would not be coming home from Memphis, Tenn. She was the oldest of Martin Luther King four children, and on that day in the spring of 1968, she wanted to hate the man King who had fired a bullet into the right side of her father's head. "I hate the man who killed my daddy," she said to her mother. "Your daddy wouldn't want you to," Coretta Scott King replied. With tears streaming down her face, the girl said, "I'm not going to cry because my daddy is real- that may have put him at odds with a lot of trends of American society," Berlin said.

Hine agreed: "If he had lived, I doubt that the powers-that-be would have recognized him with a national holiday. He was becoming a very (outspoken) social critic." Many who will celebrate King's birth "conveniently forget those parts of King's legacy they weren't comfortable with," Garrow said. "King as a critic of American foreign policy and King as a critic of American poverty and maldistribution of wealth" is the King that isn't celebrated in most of these celebrations," he said. As the country gains distance from the events that propelled King into national prominence, the perspective on his role will change, predicts James 0. Horton, associate professor of history at George Washington University who specializes in Afro-American "history.

"1 see Martin Luther King as part of a long tradition of black protests that stretches into the Colonial said. "Right now, our generation tends to see him as part of this great thing that happened in our lives. I think 100 years from now. it will be easier to see what happened in the '50s and '60s as part of a long, evolutionary process." King's magnetism and per- ry not dead and one day I'm going to see him again in heaven." On Jan. 20, she will see an entire nation honor her father with a new- holiday.

She and the rest of the King family will join thousands of people on the streets of Atlanta in a march to keep her father's dream alive. Continued from Page 6A suasive powers rallied millions around his plea for equality, historians say, and demonstrated in a dramatic way the contradictions between America's principles and its practices. "The principles enunciated by Thomas Jefferson that all men were created equal were never real until Martin Luther King," said Robert L. Harris an associate professor of Afro- American history at Cornell University. "When you talk about the fathers of the United States, people are going to talk about Jefferson, Madison, Lincoln and Martin Luther King in the same On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, King said he dreamed "that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." In some measure, King's dream for his children has come true.

But it hasn't been easy for his children to live with the dream and the legend that their father has become. As a student at New York University, Yolanda King tried to escape the King legacy. "There was a period I really tried to escape any direct responsibility for what was left to us," she King has said. "But it was too much a part of me." After graduating, she and Attallah Shabazz, the daughter of Malcolm formed a theater group in New York called Nucleus. The theater group focuses on social issues in its plays.

Yolanda, now 30, also serves as director of the Cultural Affairs Institute at the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change here. How the world has changed since then WASHINGTON (AP) Since 1968, the year Martin Luther King was shot: proportion of American blacks 25 years and older with high school diplomas has doubled from 30 percent of the black population to nearly 60 percent now. proportion of blacks with college degrees nearly tripled from about 4 percent to 11 percent over those years, according to Census Bureau figures. holding public office from school board to Congress numbered 1,469 in 1968.

Today there are more than 6,000, including 20 members of Congress, 392 state representatives and senators and 295 mayors. of black voters is 66 percent, about the same today as it was in 1968, while registration of white voters has slipped from 69 percent to about 61 percent, according to the Joint Center for Political btudies. joblessness reached nearly 15 percent at the end of last year compared with 5.9 percent for whites. Unemployment in 1968 was 7 percent for blacks and 4.1 percent for whites th 1m edian famil income for black familes in 1984 was SS; while it was $27,686 for white families a bigger gap than in with $26 882 IS whites 1984 llarS $16 3 com ared census figures showed 22 percent of the 33.7 million Americans living poverty were black; 1970 figures showed that 30 percent of the 25.4 million Americans in poverty were black In Memory Of A Dream. 0 The Following Remarks Are From President Ronald Reagan and Mrs.

Coretta Scott King, on November 2, 1983 During the Official Signing Ceremony Proclaiming Martin Luther King Day. children will one day live in. a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skiabutby the content of their character. Dr.Martm Luther JAN. 15, 1929 APR.

4, 1968 THE PRESIDENT: Mrs. King, members of the King family distinguished members of the Congress, ladies and honored guests. I am very pleased to welcome you to the White House, the home that belongs to all of us. the American peopie. When.I was thinking of the contributions to our country, the man that we're honoring today, a passage attributed to the American poet, John Greenleaf Whittier, comes to mind.

"Each crisis brings its word and deed." In America, in the fifties and sixties, one of the important crises we faced was racial discrimination. The man whose words and deeds in that crisis stirred our nation to the very depths of its soul was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Martin Luther King was born in 1929, in an America where, because of the color of their skin, nearly one in ten lived lives that were separate and unequal. Most black Americans were taught in segregated schools.

Across the country, too many could find only poor jobs, toiling for low wages. They were refused entry into hotels and restaurants, and made to use separate facilities. In a nation that proclaimed liberty and justice for all, too many black Americans were living neither. In one city, a rule required all blacks to sit in the rear of public buses. But in 1955, when a brave woman named Rosa Parks was told to move to the back of the bus, she said, "No." A young minister in a local Baptist church, Martin Luther King, then organized a boycott of the bus company a boycott that stunned the country.

Within six months the courts had ruled the segregation of public transportation unconstitutional. Dr. King had awakened something strong and true, a sense that true justice must be colorblind, and that among white and black Americans, as he put it, "Their destiny is tied up with our destiny, and their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom; we cannot walk alone." In the years after the bus boycott, Dr. King made equality of rights his life's work. Across the country, he organized boycotts, rallies and marches.

Often, he was beaten, but he never slopped teaching non-violence. "Work with the faith," he told his followers, that honor and suffering is redemptive. In 1964 Dr King became the yongest man in history to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Dr. King's work brought him to this city often.

And in one sweltering August day in 1963, he addresses a quarter of a million people at the Lincoln Memorial. If American history grows from two centuries to twenty, his words that day will never be forgotten. "I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood." In 1968, Martin Luther King was gunned down by a brutal assassin his life cut short at the age of 39. But those 39 short years had changed American forever. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 had guaranteed all Americans equal use of public accommodations, equal access to programs financed by federal funds and the right to compete for employment on the sole basis of individual merit.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 had made certain that from then on, black Americans would get to vote. But most important it was not just a change of law. It was a change of heart the conscience of America had been touched. Across the land, people had begun to treat each other not as blacks and whites, but as fellow Americans, and since Dr. King's death, his father, the Reverend Martin Luther King ST.

and his wife, Coretta King, have eloquently and forcefully carried on his work. Also his family have joined that cause. Now our nation has decided to honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. by setting aside a day each year to remember him and the just cause he stood for.

We've made historic strides since Rosa Parks refused to go to the back of the bus. As a democratic people, we can take pride in the knowledge that we Americans recognized a grave injustice and took action to correct it and we should remember that in far too many countries, people like Dr King never had the opportunity to speak out, at all. bl tr sti11 ma America. So each year on Martin Luther King Day, let us not only recall Dr. King, but rededicate ourselves to the commandments he believed in and sought to live every day.

"Thou shall love thy God with all thy heart and thou shall love thy neighbor as thyself." And I just have to believe that all of us if all of us, young and old, Republicans and Democrats, do all we can to live up to those commandments, then we will see the day when Dr King dream comes true, and in his words, "All of God's children will be able to sing with new meaning, "landwhere my fathers died land of the pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom Thank you, God bless you, and I will sign it. Leader Baker and the rtisHnmiichcui tf j-v cu uci ailUilICIIUS All right-thinking people, all right-thinking Americans are joined in 31.TU WILD US nftv tho fkTiT- fc aujg une wno aiso was the recipient the highest recognition which the world bestows, the Nobel Peace Prize wtofS OW Xa 7e he mbol wterf was right about America, what was noblest and best, what human beings have pursued since the beginning of history. He loved unconditionally. He was in constant pursuit of truth and when he discovered it, he embraced it. His non-violent campaigns brought about redemption, reconciliation and justice He taught us that only peaceful means can bring about peaceful ends 'that our goal was to create the love communitv.

America is a more democratic nation, a more just nation, a more peaceful nation because Martin Luther King became her pre-eminent non-violent commander. flfertm Lutter King and his spirit live within all of us Thank God for the blessing of his life and his leadership and his commitment Wat manner 01man was this? May we make ourselves worthy to canyon his dream and create the love community Thank you. ABCPLAYHOUSE Affordable, Attentive Child Care III? Scaly 74J-4MS Ernestine Wells, Owner AGAPELAND DAYCARE NOW ACCEPTING INFANTS.13 YEARS Pre-School Program After School-Transportation BreaVlasf. Hoi Limchej. SnacVj Served 2411-69th 513 Market 4428S We donafe of your cash register receipts your church or any non-profit organizaffonof your choice.

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