ATLANTA - Four-year-old Jabari Flemings is gazing innocently up at a television monitor when his mother, Glenda, swiftly steps between him and the flickering image and gently nudges him along.

She has brought him to the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site to teach him about his past. But he's too young for this: segregation-era footage of two black men lynched in a leafless tree.

"At this age he didn't need to see that," the 40-year-old Flemings says. "Later, he'll find out."

As his mother talks, Jabari sits amid the photographs of restaurants with "Whites Only" signs and policemen siccing German shepherds on black protesters. In one hand, he clutches a Blue's Clues doll, in the other, a park brochure with the words printed across it in bold, sunburst colors, "I HAVE A DREAM."

That dream of universal human rights spread unstoppably through the 20th century, carried by leaders like King and his spiritual mentor, Mohandas "Mahatma" Gandhi, who strides in bronze at the entrance to the King memorial.

It is a dream fed through hunger strikes in India, watered with blood in China, beaten into the human consciousness with clubs in the American South and tempered in the crematory fires of a German madman who questioned the right of entire peoples to even exist.

"I think the legacy of this century really is one of fear, terror, cruelty - but also of a response to terror, fear and cruelty," Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel, who survived Hitler's death camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald, said in a telephone interview.

If this century was a long march for civil rights, gay rights and the rights of the handicapped, among those in the lead were women.

"Suffragettes" in Britain and the United States worked for decades to win equality, first through calm persuasion and, when that failed, through civil disobedience, a tactic later protesters would adopt. They broke street lamps, cut telephone lines and slashed museum paintings. One suffragist threw herself under the king's horse during a race and was killed. In the end, suffragettes got their vote.

And others, elsewhere, asserted their rights.

In 1909, W.E.B. Du Bois and others formed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to redeem the promise of equality made a half century earlier by Abraham Lincoln.

In India, Gandhi used nonviolent civil disobedience to end British colonial rule.

Though such leaders were essential, perhaps the greatest catalyst for the human rights movement in this century was Adolf Hitler's Holocaust.

When the smoke of World War II cleared and revealed the ashes of 6 million - Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and others persecuted for simply being who they were - it became clear that the internal affairs of nations could no longer be passed off as nobody else's business.

In 1948, three years after the UN's founding, nations adopted a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, guided along by former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt. It upheld such basics as the right to equality and freedom from torture, but it did not become a binding convention until 1966.

In the intervening years, many governments, including Germany's, established a Bill of Rights. In the United States, this was the era of the civil rights movement, the series of marches, sit-ins, church rallies and boycotts that ultimately dismantled segregation laws that had evolved since the Civil War.

Many say the movement truly began when one black woman, Rosa Parks, was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery, Ala., bus, and blacks responded with a crippling boycott.

Over and over, the electronic images that have chronicled the 20th century brought the demands for rights into everyone's hearing and seeing, making it harder to shrug off abuses happening somewhere else.

One group's strides inspired others, and sometimes success surprised even the adherents.

It is truly a paradox that a century so steeped in blood should also be marked by so many relatively bloodless miracles.

Cold War dissidents who for decades chipped away at Soviet totalitarianism finally saw students chip down the Berlin Wall. After enduring Apartheid's brutalities, Nelson Mandela emerged from his 27-year imprisonment to lead South Africa toward racial reconciliation.

As the 20th century ends, the focus has turned to how to enforce human rights laws, although in the end, changing people's convictions is more important than enforcing laws.

True, said the Rev. Joseph Lowery, a co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference who marched alongside King, but repressed groups cannot afford to wait for people's convictions to catch up with the law.

"I'm a preacher, and people's motives interest me," Lowery says. "But ... if he's got his foot on my neck, I'd like his foot off my neck - regardless of his attitude."

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