Muncie Times, Muncie, Delaware County, 17 January 2005 — Page 54

Page 54 • The Muncie Times • January 17, 2005

Martin Luther King He led a mass struggle for racial equality that doomed segregation and changed America forever

By Jack E. White Monday, April 13, 1998 It is a testament to the greatness of Martin Luther King Jr. that nearly every major city in the U.S. has a street or school named after him. It is a measure of how sorely his achievements are misunderstood that most of them are located in black neighborhoods. Three decades after King was gunned down on a motel balcony in Memphis, Tenn., he is still regarded mainly as the black leader of a movement for black equality. That assessment, while accurate, is far too restrictive. For all King did to free

blacks from the yoke of segregation, whites may owe him the greatest debt, for liberating them from the burden of America's cen-turies-old hypocrisy about race. It is only because of King and the movement that he led that the U.S. can claim to be the leader of the "free world" without inviting smirks of disdain and disbelief. Had he and the blacks and whites who marched beside him failed, vast regions of the U.S. would have remained morally indistinguishable from South Africa under apartheid, with terrible consequences for America's standing among nations. How could America have

convincingly inveighed against the Iron Curtain while an equally oppressive Cotton Curtain remained draped across the South? Even after the Supreme Court struck down segregation in 1954, what the world now calls humanrights offenses were both law and custom in much of America. Before King and his movement, a tired and thoroughly respectable Negro seamstress like Rosa Parks could be thrown into jail and fined simply beeause she refused to give up her seat on an Alabama bus so a white man could sit down. A six-year-old black girl like Ruby Bridges could be hectored and spit on by a

white New Orleans mob simply because she wanted to go to the same school as white children. A 14-year-old black boy like Emmett Till could be hunted down and murdered by a Mississippi gang simply because he had supposedly made suggestive remarks to a white woman. Even highly educated blacks were routinely denied the right to vote or serve on juries. They could not eat at lunch counters, register in motels or use whites-only rest rooms; they could not buy or rent a home wherever they chose. In some rural enclaves in the South, they were even compelled to get off the sidewalk and stand in the street

if a Caucasian walked by. The movement that King led swept all that away. Its victory was so complete that even though those outrages took place within the living memory of the baby boomers, they seem like ancient history. And though this revolution was the product of two centuries of agitation by thousands upon thousands of courageous men and women, King was its culmination. It is impossible to think of the movement unfolding as it did without him at its helm. He was, as the cliche has it, the right man at the right time.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. » Martin Luther King, Jr,

Pencaadi - Supplies loa the Lloai Proeessional.

rate, Act

;E . TflE. AMffiPtlilpf DREAM OWN yOfflIMiHOME!

^Oakwood Ave Unde, IN 47304

Equal Houst! Opportunity