2. Strength to Love (2)

Martin Luther King won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 for his brave leadership in the struggle for black equality in America. As you will see in this extract, obtaining recognition of black civil rights was a long struggle, one for which Martin Luther King eventually paid the highest price.

The black people badly needed a strong leader who was not afraid. And Martin Luther King knew well what dangers threatened him when he agreed to be their leader. But in church that Sunday he told his people to love one another and to think kindly of their enemies. This wasn't easy in Montgomery. For most of the white people, and all of the police, seemed to be their enemies.

But at last they proved their point. The buses were no longer divided. The highest court in the land decided that it was against the law to have separate seats for black and white people on buses. The bus companies had lost a lot of money.

But the trouble wasn't over. Angry whites fired at the buses and at four black churches in the town. A bomb was thrown at Dr. King's house and might have killed his family. The house of a white minister who agreed with his black friends was also bombed.

In the next ten years Martin Luther King led the fight for full "civil rights" for southern negroes. There were so many of them that they couldn't be defeated if they were determined to resist. He told them that if one hundred thousand blacks marched in a procession to an important point in the centre of a city they would make it impossible for the most stupid government official to use weapons against them.

They went in large numbers and sat in restaurants where black people weren't welcome. They refused to leave until they were carried out by the police. They went about teaching the people that they had a right and duty to elect their own officials. Many of them were afraid of what would happen to them if they voted.

The southern whites grew angrier and angrier. In the state of Mississippi alone more than forty civil rights workers, both black and white, were murdered and no one was punished. More than fifty black churches were burned or bombed. In one, four little girls were killed. The white people were terribly afraid of what the black people would do when they discovered their own strength.

For, as Dr. King said, much of the struggle for black equality had to be fought by each black person inside himself. Each black man must say, "I am somebody. I am a person. I am a man of worth and honour. I have a rich and noble history, however painful ... that history has been." Each man must win his own right to be called a man in the nation that called him "boy". His father had always said to him, "Nobody can make a slave of you if you don't think like a slave."

The strength of the civil rights movement was the nonviolent march. Earlier, black leaders had fought for justice through the law courts, while the people waited and hoped. The huge processions which King and his followers led brought everyone on to the field of action. Even the children marched to demand their rights as free people. Like their parents they were arrested in very large numbers and were sent to prison. Dr. King was in prison many times.

In 1963 he led a great march to the nation's capital in Washington, D.C. Two hundred and fifty thousand people, many of them white, gathered at the heart of the nation, singing their freedom song: "We shall overcome one day." Martin Luther King was the main speaker. And he spoke to that huge crowd as he had never spoken before. He threw away the speech he had prepared and spoke whatever words came to his lips:

"I say to you today, even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream." His dream was of a country where men would be truly equal. "I have a dream that my four little children one day will live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the strength of their character ... With this faith we will be able to work together, to struggle together, to go to prison together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing we will be free one day."

After the march he and other black leaders met President Kennedy at the White House. Soon after this the United States Government passed two important civil rights laws, a big victory for the coloured people.

John Kennedy, as we have seen, admired the kind of courage that results in action. He gave great support and comfort to the King family when Dr. King was in prison. His death, later in 1963, was a serious blow to them all. And Martin Luther King knew that what had happened to John Kennedy might happen to him also. For he said, an unjust society is a sick society in which good men are murdered without cause. He had once been attacked and nearly killed by a mad woman with a knife. She was a black woman too. He and his family bravely accepted the fact that he might be killed any day as he went among the crowds.

In 1964 he won one of the highest honours a man can receive. He was given the Nobel Peace Prize "for his leadership of the nonviolent struggle for racial equality". He was only thirty-five. He was the fourth coloured man to win the prize in four years.

Many black people were growing angry at their slow progress. They wanted to use violent means to gain their ends. But King did not approve of the new movement for "black power". "Nonviolence is power," he said, "but it is the right and good use of power ... it can save the white man as well as the negro."

Like Gandhi, he saw the movement he had begun beginning to split up as people used it for their separate ends. Groups like the Black Power Movement seemed to despair of a country where black and white people could live happily together. Their patience was coming to an end. King wanted to reach out to whites as well as blacks. "Negroes hold only one key to the lock of peaceful change," he said. "The other is in the hands of the whites."

Martin Luther King became the leader not only of the black people but of all the poor, in the north as well as in the south. He was planning a great poor people's march when he was shot and killed on 4 April 1968. This time the attacker was white. Dr. King had spent his short life trying to find a better way to meet trouble than with a knife or gun. He had given thousands of people the strength which he possessed in large measure—the strength to love others even in the face of hate, injustice and death.

From Great People of Our Time, ed., by Carol Christian,

Macmillan Education, 1977.