Lessons Martin Luther King Jr. taught still resonate

Many years ago, when the South was catching fire over civil rights, my editor at the Chicago Daily News innocently asked, "How would you like to go south with a busload of ministers and priests?"

I could barely contain my excitement. This was the story I had dreamed of. Within days, I found myself in one of several buses headed to Albany, Georgia, jammed with clergymen wanting to change the world that I wanted only to cover. It was 1961, and the great civil rights conflict of American history lay before us on the highways pointed south.

Everyone grew quiet as we approached Albany. Already in other parts of the South, intruders such as we had been greeted with snarling dogs, rifles and baseball bats. But here, the clergy had but five minutes to pray on the steps of City Hall before the no-nonsense Southern police ushered them into the jail.

I escaped, as journalists often do, when New York Times correspondent Claude Sitton, a charming, rough-hewn New Englander, took me by the hand and led me away. "Come with me," he said. As it happened, he led me right to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., sitting in a large, semi-wild garden at a picnic table.

He was very serious. There were no jokes, no laughing. He was simply a handsome young pastor who was about to turn the world around. He talked about tactics, about strategy, about how his people could get hurt in the coming fight for justice. He looked like he had the world in his hands, and indeed, he did.

Then we left, and I made my way to the alley behind the jail where my clergy pals were locked up. For hours, they delighted in sending notes out their windows to me - for their wives, for their colleagues, for the press. I guarded every one. The next day, they rousted us all home.

What is important for young (and old) Americans to know today, on the week of Martin Luther King's birthday, is that, despite the way it all turned out, there were no absolutes or any assurances. One of Dr. King's many brilliant strokes of mind was to always make success appear to be inevitable, irrevocable, foreordained. It was not.

The civil rights fight, which began after the Civil War, has never really ended, even when LBJ's Civil Rights Act passed in 1964. The Freedom Riders after us went through horrible violence, little black children were killed in arson fires, and all this sacrifice might have resulted in only a half-country where blacks had minimal rights, but none of the full rights of a true citizen. A third-class nation.

To the credit of Martin Luther King Jr. - and the United States of America, and even my funny fellow bus-riders - that did not happen.

"Martin," as those close to him called him in almost a whisper, kept them going with beautiful words:

- "Faith is the first step even when you don't see the whole staircase."

- "The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

- "No individual can live alone, no nation can live alone, and as long as we try, the more we are going to have war in this world."

Dr. King accomplished something so absolutely amazing that, even now, I am still unable to grasp it. He taught his followers Gandhian nonviolence in order to win freedom. He took African-American youngsters, used to nothing but prejudice and violence and fear, and taught them how not to move when a Southern white policeman beat them senseless with his club.

The tactic would not have worked everywhere. But it worked in India against the British and it worked in America against the white majority. He was using THEIR faith against his own.

And this week? What would he have taught? I believe he would have taught white Americans to "keep the faith," to hold to their belief in equality and to be kind to all men and women.

And to his fellow African-Americans? I believe that, even while praising the enormous strides so many of his brothers and sisters have made, he would focus on the poor, uneducated, unemployed black men. He would tell them to eschew alcohol in excess and drugs in entirety; to go to church on Sunday in order to become moral men; and above all, to be a father to their children instead of being absent.

We all had Martin Luther King Jr. as a kind of "national father" for too short a time. He was cruelly taken from us too soon. Surely it is time that his young successors learn from this great man how to use the strength God gave them to continue working toward "a new day of justice and brotherhood and peace."

Email Georgie Anne Geyer at gigi_geyer@juno.com.

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