Our new friend Martin

The Whirlwinds of Revolt: 'At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68,' By Taylor Branch

Anthony Lewis in the Times Book Review: We have had nothing like it in this country in living memory: a commanding moral voice, attached to no political party or public office, that moved governments and changed social institutions. That was Martin Luther King Jr.

He was despised by many. His ideas were sometimes rejected. He failed as well as succeeded. But he would not retreat from attacking what he came to believe were the three great afflictions of mankind: racism, war and poverty. In little more than a dozen years — from Dec. 5, 1955, when he set the Montgomery bus boycott on its way, to April 4, 1968, when he was murdered — he changed the face of America.

It's so easy to forget how different this country was not so very long ago. It's hard to imagine the nation dependent on larger than life figures like Dr. King--and Lyndon Johnson--just to make it through each day.

And it's worth remembering how MLK was villified by most Americans in most parts of the country--his sainted image is one that revisionist history and whites with something to hide have bestowed, and grudgingly at that. Just read the Times' sidebar of contemporary articles on Dr. King and the civil rights movement.

There's also an element of nervous political correctness that wraps Dr. King in the mantles of sainthood in order to avoid grappling with what he really said and stood for.

Johnson, race and Vietnam were preoccupations in tandem. In the same month as the march from Selma to Montgomery, March 1965, the first American combat units went ashore at Da Nang. King had had a good relationship with the president, but it broke down over the issue that Johnson rightly feared would overwhelm his reputation on social justice.

Branch's picture of Dr. King on Vietnam is of a man coming slowly, reluctantly, but irresistibly to embrace the issue — against the advice of many supporters. Finally, at Riverside Church in New York on April 4, 1967, he called for the United States to "set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva Agreement."

The Riverside speech drew heavy criticism. John Roche, a Brandeis University professor who was then on the White House staff, said King had "thrown in with the Commies." He told the president that King was "inordinately ambitious and quite stupid (a bad combination)." A Washington Post editorial said, "Many who have listened to him with respect will never again accord him the same confidence." But King did not give way. He told a church audience that the press had been "so noble in its praise" when he preached nonviolence toward white oppressors but inconsistently "will curse you and damn you when you say be nonviolent toward little brown Vietnamese children."

Racism in America was not — and is not — confined to the South. Branch reminds us of that in small ways and large. In 1965, he notes, Mary Travers of the trio Peter, Paul and Mary kissed Harry Belafonte on the cheek at a rally. CBS television, which was showing the rally, was besieged by protesting callers, and took the rally off the air for 90 minutes.

We're not that far removed from the 50s and 60s in this country. You can hear many echoes of the way 'negroes' were once portrayed and condescended to in the media's coverage of immigrants--the same sense that somehow 'these people' aren't full citizens, are inherently foreign, that they stand apart from the mainstream, that their actions and statements are offered up to be judged and deemed acceptable or not, tolerated or not--that if they don't watch themselves and what they say, and I mean boy like now, they might have to pay the price in these times of turmoil.

Maybe one day King's idea that people are who they say they are, regardless of skin color, will trickle through to the Times and make them stop identifying Americans born and raised here as 'Asian' when they mean Asian American.

Maybe one day the Times will stop telling a black girl born in Sweden that she can't possibly be Swedish.

"I'm Swedish," says one Somali girl. "And I'm proud to be Swedish. I'm born here."

Photo of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Lyndon Baines Johnson from Hulton Archive/Getty Images via the New York Times.