AMERICAN NOTES: King's Legacy

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The man who did more than any one else to inspire the civil rights revolution of the '60s was killed only seven years ago. Last week Americans, black and white, commemorated the 46th birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. in a variety of ways that included a march around the White House demanding jobs. That demonstration was, in a way, an anachronism, because the movement led by the young Baptist minister has totally changed in character and tactics since the days when he was in the forefront of the marches against racism.

King's own Southern Christian Leadership Conference has drastically declined in size and importance. CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) has disintegrated. The organization of young activists known as SNCC (Student Non violent Coordinating Committee) has disappeared, as have the Black Panthers.

Since passage of the landmark civil rights legislation in the '60s, the struggle for equality has changed from challenging the system to working within it, from getting laws on the books to making them effective, from confrontation in the streets to politics. In 1965, the year that Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, there were 72 black elected officials in the eleven states that formed the Confederacy; today there are 1,555. There are 16 blacks in the House of Representatives, as well as black mayors in half a dozen American cities with populations over a quarter of a million, including some of the largest: Los Angeles, Detroit, Newark and King's own Atlanta.

So radically have the climate and strategy of the civil rights movement altered in the past few years that Vernon Jordan, executive director of the Urban League, says: "We will not see the era of a Martin Luther King again, but the movement is still viable, and we are still fighting the good fight." Without King's consummate leadership, the movement would never have entered today's more dispassionate era of quiet and increasingly assured accomplishment.