Spirtual Wealth

On the morning of April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. slept late. In the afternoon, he joked with his companions, taunting them into a pillow fight in his motel room.

An hour later, he stepped onto the balcony of his room and paused a second, debating inwardly whether to take a jacket. Somewhere off to his right, James Earl Ray brought the crosshairs of his rifle sights onto King’s neck and squeezed the trigger.

It was the end of a life… and the beginning of a powerful legacy.

This week millions of Americans paused to remember and celebrate the life and achievements of Martin Luther King, Jr., the twentieth century’s most influential civil rights activist. King spoke passionately, wrote persuasively and led countless marches and sit-ins, crying out for justice for oppressed minorities in the United States.

In 1963, he was Time magazine’s Man of the Year. The following year, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize at 35, the youngest peace-prize winner ever. In 1977, he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Like Jefferson and Lincoln, King was unequivocally the right man in the right place at the right time. It wasn’t just that blacks were systematically denied equal rights and opportunities. There were the daily humiliations as well.

As a boy in the Deep South, King was regularly shooed away from white stores, white restaurants, white bathrooms, even white water fountains. On a long return bus trip from a debating contest, he and his teacher were told to stand so that white passengers could sit. In a downtown department store, an elderly woman once slapped him saying, “The little nigger stepped on my foot!”

King later recounted that he became determined to hate every white person. But his father, a Christian minister, taught him otherwise, though he too chafed at the indignities.

When his father was stopped by a traffic policeman who addressed him as “boy,” the senior King pointed to Martin on the seat beside him and snapped, “That’s a boy. I’m a man.”

On another occasion, the two were told by a shoe clerk that blacks could only be served in the rear of the store. His father grabbed the boy’s hand. “We’ll either buy shoes sitting here or we won’t buy any shoes at all.”

America was two societies, separate but unequal. Yet King became convinced that racial hatreds were driven not by individual convictions but by attitudes deeply ingrained in society. He made it his mission to change those attitudes. And he insisted it could be done without violence.