PROGRAM SUCCESS – JANUARY 2009
PAGE 31
Martin Luther King from Page 30
the early days of the bus
boycott. A threatening telephone call at midnight
alarmed him: “Nigger, we
are tired of you and your
mess now. And if you aren’t
out of this town in three
days, we’re going to blow
your brains out and blow up
your house.” Shaken, King
went to the kitchen to pray.
“I could hear an inner voice saying to me, ‘Martin
Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice.
Stand up for truth. And lo I will be with you, even until
the end of the world.’”
urgency. That most famous speech was studded with
demands. “We have come to our nation’s capital to cash
a check,” King admonished. “When the architects of our
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,” King said. “Instead of honoring this sacred
obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad
check; a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’ “ These were not the words of a cardboard
saint advocating a Hallmark card-style version of brotherhood. They were the stinging phrases of a prophet, a
man demanding justice not just in the hereafter, but in
the here and now.
In recent years, however, King’s most quoted
line—”I have a dream 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”—has
been put to uses he would never have
endorsed. It has become the slogan for opponents of affirmative action like California’s
Ward Connerly, who insist, incredibly, that
had King lived he would have been marching
alongside them. Connerly even chose King’s
birthday last year to announce the creation of
his nationwide crusade against “racial preferences.”
Such would-be kidnappers of King’s legacy
have chosen a highly selective interpretation of his message. They have filtered out his radicalism and sense of
Jack E. White is a writer for TIME magazine and a
national correspondent who has covered civil rights
issues for 30 years.
March 19, 1965
Jan. 3, 1964
Feb. 18, 1957