There were two Americans who attempted to forge one nation from the two societies created by the Founders' failure to resolve the problem of slavery. One was Abraham Lincoln, whom we honored only implicitly on Presidents' Day (the billing being shared with George Washington). The other was Martin Luther King Jr., for whom there is a national holiday. The reason we honor King and not Lincoln lies in the strategies and tactics that each man employed in attempting to make this a single nation. Lincoln, one of our history's most heroic figures, has not been voted a holiday of his own because of the burning of Atlanta and Sherman's scorched-earth march to the sea that left a wide swath of destruction; because of the North's mistreatment of Southern prisoners of war, including the withholding of adequate food and medical care; and because of the economic brutalization of the South for years after the war. Lincoln's legacy was a miasma of hatred and resentment that made it impossible ever after to achieve the political consensus necessary to establish a Lincoln national holiday.
At a time when racial issues have returned to the fore in America, King's contribution to the struggle for racial equality cannot be overstated. But with the killing at Howard Beach and the demonstrations at Forsyth County in mind, it is still important to recognize that it was King's struggle above and beyond the push for racial equality that was his greatest accomplishment. The King holiday is not a holiday solely for blacks; if it were, we would not have achieved it. It is a holiday to which all Americans of goodwill are committed largely because King's strategy and tactics, imbued with the spirit of nonviolence, love, and affections, finally made feasible the emergence, under law, of a single nation—the states truly united.
Beyond this, King made three major contributions to our society that are seldom mentioned. First, wherever a stratified social structure exists, inevitably those on the bottom fear those at the top. Following the Civil War, black fraternal organizations, churches, and newspapers admonished blacks to stand up against fear. W. E. B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, and other black leaders carried on in the same tradition. But it was King who helped shift the psychological balance between fear and contempt, and in so doing became an enduring symbol of that shift. By leading blacks into the streets, hand-in-hand with whites, he demonstrated that fear on the bottom could be overcome simultaneously with the destruction of contempt on the top. This was truly miraculous.
Second, King used the strategy of passive resistance in a unique way. Unlike Gandhi, who used nonviolence with the support of the majority against British colonial rule. King applied it to a situation where a small minority was seeking to wrest concessions from a majority. This inversion was a remarkable achievement. With it. King brought down old bigoted institutions and helped to create new democratic ones. He understood that human conflicts—in the family, community, nation, or the world—could be reconciled only if one party was prepared to take great risks. He understood that the more enlightened had to take burdens upon themselves, and that security springs from the voluntary acceptance of insecurity. His approach demonstrated that if people of goodwill sat in together at a segregated theater, restaurant, hotel, or bus, and were prepared to persevere despite repeated arrests and violence, such institutions would be dissolved and new, more democratic ones would emerge.
Third, King's tactics came to be used by every oppressed group in the United States, and will continue to be. The Hispanics learned from him, and they went into the streets. The women's movement did the same. The students of this nation, those who demonstrated peacefully, were following his lead. Homosexuals lost their fear, came out of the closet, and marched for their rights as equal citizens. And those who were beating on homosexuals learned that they could no longer do so with impunity. In other words. King's tactics aimed to destroy the old framework of societal interactions and create a new one.
But, as the successes of the civil rights movement demonstrate, every advance that a society makes is accompanied by new problems. The legislative victories of the early 1960s resulting from King's courageous efforts had both positive and negative consequences. They gave blacks a legal basis for social and economic mobility. However, this led to a decline in black entrepreneurial activities and to the isolation of the black poor.
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