Transcendent Symbol

For Martin Luther King Jr., death came as a tragic finale to an American drama fraught with classic hints of inevitability. Propelled to fame in the throes of the Negro's mid-century revolution, he gave it momentum and steered it toward nonviolence. Yet the movement he served with such elo quence and zeal was beginning to pass him by, and nonviolence to many black militants had come to seem naive, outmoded, even suicidal.

Black militants used his murder to cry, "The civil rights movement is dead!" But they had said it long before his assassination. King was dangerously close to slipping from prophet to patsy. When his previous week's march in Memphis degenerated into riotous looting, a black gang leader who organized the violence chortled: "We been making plans to tear this town up for a long time. We knew he'd turn out a crowd." For years, behind his back, King's Negro denigrators had called him "de Lawd." Lately he had heard himself publicly called an Uncle Tom by hotheads out to steal both headlines and black support.

Yet if ever there were a transcendent Negro symbol, it was Martin Luther King. Bridging the void between black despair and white unconcern, he spoke so powerfully of and from the wretchedness of the Negro's condition that he became the moral guidon of civil rights not only to Americans but also to the world beyond. If not the actual catalyst, he was the legitimizer of progress toward racial equality. His role and reputation may have been thrust upon him, but King was amply prepared for the thrust.

Michael to Martin. Born Jan. 15, 1929, in a middle-class Georgia family active for two generations in the civil rights cause, he was the second child and first-born son, named after his father, Michael Luther King. The elder King, pastor of Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church, changed both their names when Martin was five to honor the Reformation rebel who nailed his independent declaration to the Castle Church.

The small cruelties of bigotry left their scars despite King's warm, prolective family life. He zipped through high school, entered Atlanta's Negro Morehouse College at 15, pondered a career and searched for "some intellectual basis for a social philosophy." Thoreau's essay "Civil Disobedience" showed him the goal, and King picked the ministry as a proper means to achieve it.

At Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pa., where he was elected class president and outstanding student, he discovered the works of Hegel and Kant. Here also he was exposed to the writings of Mohandas Gandhi, whose mystic faith in nonviolent protest became King's lodestar. "From my background," he said, "I gained my regulating Christian ideals. From Gandhi I learned my operational technique." Indeed, Gandhi's word for his doctrine, satyagraha, becomes in translation King's slogan, "soul force."