Time shouldn’t fade the depth of King’s words or his work

It has been a quarter of a centu- ry since Martin Luther King Jr. Day was first recognized as a national holiday. That’s 25 years of some of King’s most fervent dreams realized and others deferred.

This is the most politically complicated holiday on the federal calendar. Its observance was won thorough a 15-year effort in Congress and in the court of public opinion, but even after the day became a federal holiday, it was another 15 years before the last holdout among the 50 states signed on.

In time, though, the wisdom of marking a day to celebrate the ideals of a man who lost his life for preaching the equality of man could not be denied.

President Ronald Reagan, who signed the MLK Day bill into law, had first opposed it. But in the Rose Garden, with King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, looking on, Reagan acknowledged that “America is a more democratic nation, a more just nation, a more peaceful nation because Martin Luther King, Jr. became her pre-eminent nonviolent commander.”

“All right-thinking people, all right-thinking Americans are joined in spirit with us this day as the highest recognition which this nation gives is bestowed upon Martin Luther King Jr.,” Reagan said.

But Reagan’s saying it did not make it so, and even today there are people who use simplistic excuses for not giving King his due.

It may seem counter intuitive, but as time goes by it becomes easier to fail to recognize the greatest of Martin Luther King Jr. Almost two generations have been born since King was assassinated in 1968. In a couple of years, we will mark the 50th anniversary of his most famous speech, “I Have a Dream.” An increasing number of people have only a superficial knowledge of our national heroes, either by accident or on purpose. George Washington never told a lie. Abraham Lincoln split rails by day and read by candlelight at night. Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream.

They all deserve so much more.

Inmate correspondence

As inspirational as King’s dream speech was and is, his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” captures much more of the complexity of his fight against the brutal injustice of the Jim Crow laws he was working to overturn.

Answering criticism from members of the clergy who saw the Atlanta preacher as an outside agitator, King defended civil disobedience. “Sometimes a law is just on its face and unjust in its application,” he wrote. “For instance, I have been arrested on a charge of parading without a permit. Now, there is nothing wrong in having an ordinance which requires a permit for a parade. But such an ordinance becomes unjust when it is used to maintain segregation and to deny citizens the First-Amendment privilege of peaceful assembly and protest.”

Later he reminds his critics: “We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal’ and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was ‘illegal.’ It was ‘illegal’ to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany. Even so, I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers. If today I lived in a Communist country where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I would openly advocate disobeying that country’s antireligious laws.”

And in today’s climate, perhaps the most startling thing throughout a letter that today fills 10 computer printout pages, King is never uncivil. King was battling forces of evil that by any standard today would be termed terrorists. “There have been more unsolved bombings of Negro homes and churches in Birmingham than in any other city in our nation,” he points out. Bombing homes and gathering places was no less terrorism in America then than it is today in the Middle East. And yet, while King argues his case eloquently and tenaciously, quoting philosophers and poets and apostles, he ends with a plea, “If I have said anything in this letter that overstates the truth and indicates an unreasonable impatience, I beg you to forgive me.”

The letter was dated April 16, 1963. Barely five years later, on April 4, 1968, his civility, his passion, his logic and his voice were silenced by a rifle bullet. But we will always have his words and his example. This holiday marking his birth on Jan. 15, 1929, is a time to remember that.