Nation: Transcendent Symbol

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Moving on to Boston University, King gained a doctorate and a bride, Antioch College Graduate Coretta Scott, and in 1954 took his first pastorate in Montgomery, Ala. There in 1955, a seamstress' tired feet precipitated the first great civil rights test of power and launched King's galvanic career. Mrs. Rosa Parks's arrest for re fusing to give her seat on a town bus to a white man ended 382 days later with capitulation of the Montgomery bus line to a comprehensive Negro consortium and the U.S. Supreme Court. King, too new to Montgomery to have enemies in the usually fragmented Negro community, became its chief. His march to martyrdom had begun.

"All a Hoax." The initial triumph annealed his philosophy but taught him little about strategy. When the following years brought sit-ins and freedom rides, King was there with organizational support. He formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and midwifed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Nonetheless, his preoccupation with ideas instead of details was irking his own camp, and Albany, Ga., gave him a rueful jolt. In 1961, just two days after he led a mass demonstration and found himself in jail, vowing to stay there until Albany consented to desegregate its public facilities, King was out on bail and the campaign collapsed. "We thought that the victory had been won," he said. "When we got out, we discovered it was all a hoax."

Albany taught him not to attack a political power structure unless he had the votes. Thereafter he aimed desultorily at intransigent merchants, more emphatically at the national heart. His horizon grew, and with it his clout. In 1963 he marched into Birmingham, tac tically prepared, and flayed that citadel of Dixie bigotry on national television. Public Safety Commissioner Theophilus ("Bull") Connor became the white villain for King's black heroes as they marched—clad in their Sunday clothes —to meet his truncheons, hoses and dogs. That world-arousing spectacle brought whites flocking to the civil rights movement in a stream that continued to grow until Negro victories began to dam its flow.

Pinnacle & Hint. By now, King was swamped with speaking engagements, whose peak perhaps was his peroration at the Lincoln Memorial. "I have a dream!" he cried, and it seemed his dream was becoming reality. King reached the pinnacle in 1964, when he received the Nobel Peace Prize, becoming the 14th American, third Negro and youngest man to win the award.

Although 1965 marked the enactment of the voting rights law and King's successful campaign in Selma, Ala., it also brought the riots in Watts. To many Negroes, the pace of gain was too slow and too meager. King went northward, turning his battle toward economic issues in New York City, Los Angeles,

Cleveland and Chicago. Already, during the Watts uprising, there had come the first hint of King's tenuous tenure. A young looter, asked if he thought Dr. King would approve, retorted: "Martin Luther Who?"