Nation: Transcendent Symbol

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More and more, King shifted and diffused his aims. He inveighed against the Viet Nam war, saying it hamstrung the civil rights drive and the war on poverty. Calling at one point for a $4,000-a-year guaranteed family income in the U.S., he threatened national boycotts and spoke of disrupting entire cities by nonviolent but obstructive camp-ins. His newly emphasized goals: "Economic security; decent, sanitary housing; a quality education."

Warning that the civil rights movement was "very, very close" to a split, he exhorted believers in nonviolence to become "more forthright, more aggressive, more militant." Late last year he added: "We have learned from hard and bitter experience that our Government does not move to correct a problem involving race until it is confronted directly and dramatically." At the end, he was organizing the massive march of the poor on Washington—and if Congress proved recalcitrant, he threatened to obstruct the national political conventions.

Slave v. Grave. Throughout his oratory ran a dark premonition that he would be slain. And with reason. Back in Montgomery, a twelve-stick dynamite bomb had been thrown on his porch, but failed to explode. In Harlem in 1958, a deranged Negro woman stabbed him dangerously near the heart. He had been pummeled and punished by white bullies in many parts of the South. He was hit in the head by a rock thrown in Chicago. When he won the Nobel Prize, Coretta King mused: "For the past ten years, we have lived with the threat of death always present." King himself had once said, "The quality, not the longevity, of one's life is what is important. If you are cut down in a movement that is designed to save the soul of a nation, then no other death could be more redemptive." In simmering Philadelphia, Miss., he declared: "Before I will be a slave, I will be dead in my grave." That epitaph hardly symbolizes what King stood for: life and love—not death and despair.

The nation may take greater heart from the luminous words he flung into the face of white America: "We will match your capacity to inflict suffering with our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force. We will not hate you, but we cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws. We will soon wear you down by our capacity to suffer. And in winning our freedom, we will so appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process." In his death, if not in life, Martin Luther King may have gone far toward that goal.