Martin Luther King Jr. Even saying his name out loud brings a certain kind of feeling—a reverence and a sense of expectancy. For only 13 years, the nation watched him. All around him was a whirlwind, a whirlwind that blew his country from one era to another. They put him in jail 29 times. Now they have named a national holiday for him.
Martin Luther King Jr. was a minister whose proclamation of the gospel could not be contained by the churches. He was a theologian and philosopher who made the streets into a classroom, where he taught and tested the greatest ideas of his time. He was a political leader who redefined the meaning and purposes of power.
This Baptist preacher was a man of peace who created more turmoil than anyone else of his generation. He was a brilliant tactician who channeled anger and pent-up frustration into nonviolent direct action and, in so doing, translated the undirected rage of an oppressed people into a disciplined movement of heroic self-sacrifice.
King was a black man who, by speaking the truth in love, became the best friend white men and women ever had, though, by and large, they didn't see it. He made nonviolence militant, truth confrontational, and righteousness a threat to established authority. He became the leader of a race, then of a nation, then of the impulse for justice throughout the world. Martin King was the embodiment of the American revolution and offered to us the best hope yet for its fulfillment.
The best way to remember and celebrate the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. is to measure ourselves by the vision for which he lived and died. In this issue Vincent Harding, in a moving tribute to his old friend, helps us do just that. Timothy McDonald of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the organization that Dr. King founded, interviews and talks with John Lewis, an Atlanta city council-member who marched at King's side, about the meaning of King's vision today. And James H. Cone brings together the vision of Martin King with that of the other towering figure of his generation, Malcolm X.
Like the child holding up the poster on this issue's cover, many people in this country—black and white, young and old—are just now getting to really know Martin Luther King Jr. Making his birthday into a national holiday should help us all to do that.
But we will come to know Martin and honor his memory only by taking his vision as an instrument for creating a new future. The "drum major for justice" would be unhappy with monuments and memorials that enshrined the past. Like another great prophet of God who led his people to freedom, Martin Luther King Jr. climbed to the mountain top, glimpsed the promised land, but never got there himself. That is left for us. And one senses that Martin's spirit will remain restless until the great journey that he carried so far is one day completed.
Jim Wallis is editor-in-chief of Sojourners.
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