President Clinton when Governor introduced the proposal to make King’s birthday a holiday in the State of Arkansas. And at Mason Temple where King delivered his last sermon, Clinton asked all Americans to honor the life and work of Dr. King.
In 2000, Clinton honoured King for his famous voting rights march in Selma, Alabama in 1965, by walking across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, arm-in-arm with Coretta Scott King (Martin’s widow), Jesse Jackson, John Lewis, Andrew Young, Joe Lowery, Julian Bond, Ethel Kennedy, and Harris Wofford.
The Selma march stirred the conscience of the nation. And five months after the Selma march, President Johnson endorsed the Voting Rights Act into law. Prior to this law, there were 300 Black elected officials, and only three African-American Congressmen. The year 2000 when Clinton walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, there were about 9,000 Black elected officials, and 39 members in the Congressional Black Caucus.
Clinton acknowledged that Dr. King was correct when he pointed out that when Black-Americans “win their struggle to become free, those who have held them down will themselves be free for the first time.”
Clinton noted too that “after Selma, white and black southerners crossed the Bridge to the New South, leaving isolation and hatred behind for new opportunities and prosperity and political influence: Without Selma, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton would never have become President of the United States.”
TIME’s Jack White argues that while Dr. King exposed and removed the yoke of segregation from Blacks, it is White America that owes King a great debt of gratitude “…for liberating them from the burden of America’s centuries-old hypocrisy about race. It is only because of King and the movement that he led that the U.S. can claim to be the leader of the ‘free world’ without inviting smirks of disdain and belief.” If the civil rights movement only met failures, argues White, large sections of America would continue to be as apartheid South Africa.Thanks to Dr. King, America commanded some respect around the world after a number of significant civil rights successes. And the new ultra-right political dispensation, with great assistance from the Reagan and the two Bush Administrations, clipped some hard-fought gains of the civil rights movement.
And what we saw throughout the 2008 Presidential campaign was an acknowledgement by millions of Americans that there was a void in the nation; and it was time that Americans genuinely invoke King’s allegiance to nonviolence, and his persisting belief in the promise of America. Obama’s campaign conspicuously epitomized this belief in the promise of America, an America for all Americans.
*(Sunday Chronicle first carried this publication)
