Who was the man called King? | Guest Opinion

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had a way of reaching people with a voice that called all people to live as instruments for justice.

Speak of King today and many ask, either by their facial expressions or their spoken questions, “Who was the man called King?” or “Who is the man that helped change a nightmare into a dream?”

To start, he was born January 15, 1929, in Georgia into a sharecropper family and named Michael Luther King, Jr. In 1934, his father (a Baptist preacher) attended a Baptist Conference in Berlin. The history of Martin Luther, the Protestant Reformation leader, inspired him to change both his and his son’s names to Martin Luther.

Ignoring his small size, King faced everyday childhood experiences: fights on and off the playground, baseball in dirt lots, riding his bicycle, YMCA and chores. Before school he helped his dad with the animals, resulting in taunts about smelling like a mule. Later in life, he would say, “I may smell like a mule but I don't think like one.”

When his grandfather passed away, his grandmother moved into the King home. Young Martin and his grandmother formed a tight bond. At age 14, he played the violin, loved opera and soul food.

He attended segregated schools in Georgia, and while he excelled as a student, he never really completed high school. His high academic ability enabled him to skip his freshman and senior years at Booker T. Washington High School. At age 15, King passed a college entrance exam and entered Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Sociology in 1948.

He then attended his first integrated school, Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania. He spent three years at Crozer, was elected president of a predominantly white senior class, and earned a Bachelor in Divinity degree in 1951.

At Crozer, his thinking changed.

During his time at Crozer, King heard a lecture by Mordecai Johnson, the first black president of Howard University, who spoke of his trip to India and on the life and teachings of Mahatma Ghandi.

Johnson spoke on the use of Soul Force (the power of love and truth) as a force for moral and social change. King eventually traveled to India and decided on Gandhi's teachings of passive non-violent resistance as the primary instrument of the Civil Rights Movement.

Winning a Crozer fellowship, he enrolled in graduate studies at Boston University, and in 1955 he became Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., earning his doctorate in theology from Boston University.

At age 29, King was prepared to follow his father in ministry, but he returned home to find unrest caused by the lack of civil liberties. King found that rather than a pulpit ministry, he was headed to the highways and the hedges seeking freedom in the everyday lives of people.

Who is King? King is the man who cared for the tired, the trampled; the man who stepped forward — not to reveal right — but to free rightness for people to live and to live as brothers.

Seeing the need and hearing the cry, he came. His search for knowledge led him to Ghandi's teachings, and from being a King and being raised in a King's home he learned that people count, people respond to love and people want to know the truth.

King is the man who brought the right message at the right time for the right reason for all people. He built on America's framework for liberty and justice. He touched hearts and recreated the dream that had fallen asleep in the very nation itself.

On April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tenn. The country was stunned. The Dreamer was dead, but what of the dream? Riots followed King’s death.

On April 11, 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the 1968 Civil Rights Act, which prohibited discrimination concerning the sale, rental, and financing of housing based on race, religion, and national origin. Legislation in 1974 and 1988 broadened the definition of discrimination, and now it is a federal crime to "by force or by threat of force, injure, intimidate, or interfere with anyone... by reason of their race, color, religion, or national origin, handicap or familial status.”

In one sense the King was crowned with the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1968.

Edgar Hargrow is a former Pasco City Councilman and was chairman of the Martin Luther King Statue Committee for Columbia Basin College. He loves spending time with his eight grandchildren, and believes doors that are opened to them come from the dedication of Dr. King to the American Dream.