Remembering Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr…
Born in Atlanta on January 15, 1929, Martin Luther King, Jr. was a prominent activist in the civil rights movement, a spectacular orator, and a practitioner of nonviolent resistance.
King, the son of a preacher and a preacher’s daughter, decided on the ministry around the age of 19, eventually embracing a religious version of individualism known as “personalism.” Some of King’s strong attraction to that philosophy was rooted in one of its major corollaries: if the dignity and worth of all human personalities was the ultimate value in the world, racial segregation and discrimination were among the ultimate evils.
King came of age at a time when trouble was brewing over government-enforced racial segregation. The races were strictly separated by law on streetcars, buses, and railroads; in schools; in waiting rooms, restaurants, hotels, boarding houses, theaters, cemeteries, parks, courtrooms, public toilets, drinking fountains, and every other public space. These laws were been passed during the early 20th century, despite the objections of private businesses that they would raise their costs and alienate customers.
Inspired by American individualist Henry David Thoreau and Indian nonviolent crusader Mohandas Gandhi, Dr. King, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, established militant nonviolent political action as the principal strategy for attacking segregationist laws.
“As you press on with justice, be sure to move with dignity and discipline using only the weapon of love…Always avoid violence. If you succumb to the temptation of using violence in your struggle, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness, and your chief legacy to the future will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos…In your struggle for justice, let your oppressor know that you are not attempting to defeat or humiliate him…you are merely seeking justice for him as well as yourself.”
Dr. King’s most fundamental principles harked back to the natural law tradition: there are moral standards for judging the legitimacy of laws. They aren’t legitimate just because government officials say they are.
“A man-made code that squares with the moral law, or the law of God, is a just law…But a man-made code that is inharmonious with the moral law is an unjust law…Let us not forget, in the memories of six million who died, that everything Adolph Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal,’ and that everything the Freedom Fighters in Hungary did was ‘illegal.’”
The world King saw around him made it clear that court decisions could be as bad as laws.
“Though the rights of the First Amendment guarantee that any citizen or group of citizens may engage in peaceable assembly, the South has seized upon the device of invoking injunctions to block our direct-action civil rights demonstrations. When you get set to stage a nonviolent demonstration, the city simply secures an injunction to cease and desist. Southern courts are well known for ‘sitting on’ this type of case; conceivably a two or three-year delay could be incurred…in Birmingham, we felt that we had to take a stand and disobey a court injunction against demonstrations, knowing the consequences and being prepared to meet them — or the unjust law would break our movement.”
Dr. King aroused controversy throughout his tumultuous public career. He was jailed 14 times. He was the target of countless death threats. He was stoned, and he was stabbed. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover warned that King was consorting with communists. So-called liberals like President John F. Kennedy were concerned that he would provoke disorder, and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy approved FBI bugging of King’s home, office and hotel rooms across the country. King’s home was blasted by a shotgun, and both it and a motel room where he stayed were bombed. And, on April 4, 1968, he was assassinated.
With courage and goodwill, Martin Luther King, Jr. reaffirmed the vision of a “higher law,” the idea that government laws must be judged by moral standards, a bedrock for liberty going back more than 2,000 years.
