King’s legacy continues to grow in ways large and small

Transformational figures never stop growing. Their lives — even when cut short — take on new meaning with time.

And so it is with the man who is honored today with a national holiday, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

King would have been 83 years old Sunday, had he lived. And there is no telling what he may have accomplished had he not been cut down in his prime by an assassin’s bullet on April 4, 1968, at the age of 39. We can only guess at what he may have accomplished if he had been given only another decade or two, or the biblical allotment of three score and 10.

In 1983, when President Ronald Reagan signed the bill establishing this holiday, he described America as “a more democratic nation, a more just nation, a more peaceful nation because Martin Luther King, Jr. became her pre-eminent nonviolent commander.”

King’s call for nonviolence extended beyond the arena of winning civil rights for the black minority. He showed an expanding interest in combatting economic inequality regardless of race and had begun speaking out against U.S. military involvement in Vietnam.

Today, though, we are left to contemplate what King managed to accomplish in the relatively short time between his emergence as a civil rights leader during the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 and his death 13 years later.

Much of what King has accomplished after his death has been on his reputation as an inspirational writer and speaker. He has grown into a symbol even larger than the 30-foot tall granite statue that was dedicated in his honor in Washington, D.C., last October.

Two different stories

Two stories reported in recent days provide their own insight into King’s evolving legacy.

A Cleveland Plain Dealer story told of how a teacher and student rescued an old reel of recording tape from a bin of material being discarded by the Glenville High School library. On the tape was an original recording of a 20-minute address King gave to the student body less than a year before his assassination.

It was a speech filled with encouragement and affirmation of a philosophy common in King’s work: That better days were ahead, but only if the students he was speaking to would do their part to make this a better world.

It is, of course, amazing that such a piece of history was bound for the trash, except that the canister in which the tape had been stored caught the eye of a scavenging art student. How that came to be apparently will remain a mystery.

But beyond that, a Plain Dealer reporter tracked down Glenville students now in their 60s who still remember parts of the speech. And because the tape has now been transferred to CDs, a whole new generation of students — the grandchildren of those witnesses to history — will be able to hear what King had to say on one of his visits to Cleveland.

The second story is shorter, but equally instructive. Some 900 cities in the United States have named streets after Martin Luther King Jr. But only last week, Memphis, the city in which King was assassinated, renamed a nine-block downtown stretch of Linden Avenue as Dr. Martin Luther King Avenue. King led one of his last marches on Linden Avenue, in support of striking Memphis sanitation workers.

There will always be skeptics, critics and historical revisionists, but as time goes on, King’s legacy seems destined to take on new depth if people only listen, study and learn from the words King left behind.

And that’s why today is what it is.