Cadence. Some cynics call King "De Lawd." He does have an upper-air way
about him, and, for a man who has earned fame with speeches, his metaphors can
be downright embarrassing. For Negroes, he says, "the word `wait' has been a
tranquilizing Thalidomide," giving "birth to an ill-formed infant of
frustration." Only by "following the cause of tender-heartedness" can man
"matriculate into the university of eternal life." Segregation is "the adultery
of an illicit intercourse between injustice and immorality," and it "cannot be
cured by the Vaseline of gradualism."
Yet when he mounts the platform or pulpit, the actual words seem
unimportant. And King, by some quality of that limpid voice or by some secret
of cadence, exercises control as can few others over his audiences, black or
white. He has proved this ability on countless occasions, ranging from the
Negroes' huge summer March on Washington to a little meeting one recent Friday
night in Gadsden, Ala. There, the exchange went like this:
King: I hear they are beating you!
Response: Yes, yes.
King: I hear they are cursing you.
Response: Yes, yes.
King: I hear they are going into your homes and doing nasty things and
beating you!
Response: Yes, yes.
King: Some of you have knives, and I ask you to put them up. Some of you
may have arms, and I ask you to put them up. Get the weapon of nonviolence, the
breastplate of righteousness, the armor of truth, and just keep marching.
Few can explain the extraordinary King mystique. Yet he has an
indescribable capacity for empathy that is the touchstone of leadership. By
deed and by preachment, he has stirred in his people a Christian forbearance
that nourishes hope and smothers injustice. Says Atlanta's Negro Minister Ralph
D. Abernathy, whom King calls "my dearest friend and cellmate": "The people
make Dr. King great. He articulates the longings, the hopes, the aspirations of
his people in a most earnest and profound manner. He is a humble man, down to
earth, honest. He has proved his commitment to Judaeo-Christian ideals. He
seeks to save the nation and its soul, not just the Negro."
Angry Memories. Whatever his greatness, it was thrust upon him. He was
born on Jan. 15 nearly 35 years ago, at a time when the myth of the subhuman
Negro flourished, and when as cultivated an observer as H.L. Mencken could
write that "the educated Negro of today is a failure, not because he meets
insuperable difficulties in life, but because he is a Negro. His brain is not
fitted for the higher forms of mental effort; his ideals, no matter how
laboriously he is trained and sheltered, remain those of a clown."
Mencken had never met the King family of Atlanta. King's maternal
grandfather, the Rev. A.D. Williams, was one of Georgia's first N.A.A.C.P.
leaders, helped organize a boycott against an Atlanta newspaper that had
disparaged Negro voters. His preacher father was in the forefront of civil
rights battles aimed at securing equal salaries for Negro teachers and the
abolition of Jim Crow elevators in the Atlanta courthouse.
