"50 Years After Bus Boycott, MLK's Path Not Yet Taken"

Exactly fifty years ago, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. ascended the pulpit of the Holt Street Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama to preach for the first time about nonviolent protest. Stop riding the buses, he urged, start marching for freedom, and don’t stop until every American has full equal rights. “We are here because first and foremost we are American citizens,” the preacher declared. “The great glory of American democracy is the right to protest for right.” His 12 year ministry to the nation had begun.

King’s message was more than a call to nonviolent protest. It was a call to transform the foundations of American society. As 1955 drew to a close, the nation was stuck in the Eisenhower era. Ike was at the height of his popularity and influence: the bland leading the bland. “Consensus was settling like snow over U.S. politics,” historian Godfrey Hodgson has written. But the consensus, like snow, was mostly white. The civil rights movement was about to demonstrate a radically alternative vision of life.

Ike was the icon of “the American way” enshrined in the white consensus. MLK would soon become the icon of a new path—a path that is still a living option for us today, though it is far more honored in the breach than the observance. The great merits of King’s path stand out most clearly when contrasted with Eisenhower's, the path that most Americans still tread because they understand no other. Eisenhower and King encapsulate both the old legacy and the new opportunity offered to us by the past half-century.

It all goes back to fundamental assumptions. Like his Christian forbears, Ike believed that people are naturally selfish. If they are going to live together, their desires must be restrained. Freedom, he once said, is merely “the opportunity for self-discipline.” The only alternative he could see was to have the government impose restraints from above. He fought communism because he feared it would deprive people of their freedom to control themselves. But he saw the communists as only one in an endless procession of groups and movements threatening freedom. Freedom would always have enemies.

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1206-24.htm