On January 20, 2009, Barack Obama was inaugurated the 44th President of the United States. I was one of the 1.8 million people who gathered on and around the Washington Mall to witness that historic event. Will President Obama be for the 21st Century what Martin Luther King, Jr., was for the 20th Century - a Redeemer for America.?
On the heels of the inauguration of Obama as President I am re-issuing: Martin Luther King, Jr., The Black Man of the Century."

OUR TRIBUTE TO MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.

Our tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr.,
Our man of the century and for time immemorial,
We honor you for the life you lived and for the things that you have done.
Oh civil rights champion par excellence and a Nobel Peace Prize winner America, your beloved and native land, has established, in your honor, the National Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday.
Your contemporaries cherish your legacy
And they are confident that generation after generation will also treasure it.
Your presence is pronounced.
It will live in perpetuity;
:Martin Luther King, Jr., we love you, we salute you; we thank you;: :We thank you:(Fade)

The Black Man of the Century

{Civil Rights freedom-fighters called him "The Black Moses." "Time" magazine selected him as "Man of the Year." Now he is called "The Man of the Century."}

As we begin the Third Millennium it seems appropriate for Americans in general and black people in particular to acknowledge with gatitude the black person who contributed most in advancing the black agenda, making it possible for black people to enjoy ciizenship rights that white people took for granted during the last century of the Second Milllennium.


Since 1619, the year Africans were first enslaved in North America, black people have fought to free themselves from white oppression. During the three and three-quarter centuries they have been on the North American continent, including 244 years in slavery, they have struggled unrelentingly in their slow and tedious "stride toward freedom." The gravity of their yearning and ever-present awareness of God's presence have enabled them to resist their oppressors and persevere with the hope that they would overcome white oppression and be creative and productive as were their African ancestors who built thriving civilizatiions. Foremost among those visionaries were these black liberators: Nat Turner who led an insurrection in 1831 that resulted in the deaths of 20 white people; Harriet Tubman, a leader of the Underground Railroad who helped slaves to escape from the South to the North and to freedom; Sojourner Truth, a notable black Abolitionist who traveled through New England and the West, moving audiences by her quaint speech hatred for slavery, which she expressed
with a strange religious mysticism; Frederick Douglass the most famous of black abolitionists, whose golden voice and soul-piercing messages pricked the consciences of both black and white people inspiring many to support the abolition movement.

Just prior to the Twentieth Century, in 1895, Booker T. Washington, founder of Tuskegee Institute, delivered his Atlanta Exposition speech. In it he stated, "In all things purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, and yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress." His message was highly accliamed by white southerners and some white northerners. W.E.B. Du Bois, the first black person to receive a Ph.D., from Harvard university, expressed his views on the course black people should take in his book, "The Souls of Black Folk," that was published in 1903. His vision and call for action was not primarily concerned with the black masses, or for that matter with white people, but rather with the "Talented Tenth," that educated elite of the black and white worlds who lead the masses. Around 1910 the Washington-Du Bois conflict, the struggle between conservative co-existence and militant pluralism, reached the point of divisiveness that threatened black people's ability to effectively oppose white oppression. These men disagreed on the "place of the Negro" in America. After Washington's death in 1915, Du Bois became the major Negro leader, however, he never gained the respect or support from white people that they had given Washington.

Mary McLeod Bethune, founder of Bethune College (later named Bethune-Cookman College) and the National Council of Negro Woman, was appointed by President Fanklin D. Roosevelt in 1936 director of the divsion of Negro Affairs of the National Youth Administration, the highest federal office then held by a black woman; Adam Clayton Powell, Congressman from New York's Harlem, defiantly confronted white southern Congressmen with a "blacks-are-not-going-to-take-it" message from a platform that was controlled by white southern Congressmen whenever any issue pertaining to black people was discussed. Before Powell became a Congressman black people had been all but denied, since Reconstruction, access to this Congressional platform. Paul Robeson, the first black person to attend Rutgers University where he was an All-American football star spent a lifetime singing messages of freedom, justice and equality. In his most celebrated song, "Ol' Man River," there is a sentence that says, "I must keep fighting until I am dying," that inspired millions in America and abroad to oppose tyranny and take a stand against unfreedom and injustice.

But when the roll is called and the prize is awarded to the black person who did most to advance black life in America it goes to a black leader who towered above all the rest, not because of his large physical stature, for, in fact, he was of small stature, or not because of his longevity, for he was assassinated at the early age of thirty-nine. He was involved in the freedom struggle for only twelve years and four months. The prize goes to Martin Luther King, Jr., who led black people in taking a leap that landed them on "planet access." Because of King's leadership, for the first time since being in America black people had access to opportunities that were availabe to white people but withheld from them. Segregation laws; police brutality, lynching and violence, committed by the Ku Klux Klan and other racist white hate groups, were enforcers that kept blacks from entering many of the doors opened to non-black citizens, including the ballot box.

King was born January 15, 1929 to Michael L. King and Alberta William King of Atlanta. He was named after his father. But in 1932 after his father returned from a trip to Africa and Europe he changed his own name and the name of his oldest son to Martin Luther king, Sr., and Jr., respectively. After graduating from Morehouse College King, Jr., spent three years at Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania before enrolling in the doctoral program at Boston University.

He was still matriculating at Boston University when I first met him in the library at Alabama State College (now Alabama State University) in October, about a month after he became the resident pastor on September 5, 1954 at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery. He expressed to me that he was doing research that would aid him in writing his disssertation. He also said that he had completed his residential studies at Boston University and was in the process of writing his dissertation. I was a senior at Alabama State College and the pastor of Bell Street Baptist Church where I had served for just over a year. I found King to have "real presence" as I expressed to Ms. Junita Brewer, a member of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church who was on the administrative staff at Alabama State College. After our twenty-five minute conversation that day I did not talk with him again untill three months later when he came with Ralph D. Abrnathy to a weekly meeting of the Baptist Ministers Conference. Abernathy introduced King to the ministers and the Conference. President H.H. Hubbard asked him if he would give some remarks, which he did. King was greeted warmly by the ministers and asked to preach at the Conference as soon as he could arrange to do so. At the close of the meeting I spoke briefly with him before dashing out the door of the Baptist Center and rushing back to Alabama State College for my social psychology class.

Although King had been in Montgomery some fifteen months prior to the Montgomery Bus Boycott he had not made a strong impression on black Montgomerians. They adcknowledged him as the young pastor of the "big-shots church," a reference that was sometimes made to Dexter Avenue Baptist Church whose members were, for the most part, educated and more restrained in their worship than members of other Baptist churches in the city. Following the March 1955 arrest and conviction of Claudette Colvin, a young black woman, for violating the bus seating segregation laws, King, like myself and some other ministers, raised our voices against the Judge's decision and the mistreatment of black bus riders. I had attended Colvin's trial, as did some other ministers, but King was not present, perhaps because he was engaged in writing his dissertation. In June of 1955 Boston University awarded him his Ph.D.

At the invitation of E.D. Nixon who was the chief black leader in Montgomery, King joined the local NAACP chapter and in August he was the featured speaker to a gathering of about sixty people attending the local chapter meeting. Mrs. Rosa Parks, secretary of the local NAACP chapter, joined with other attendees in praising King for his dynamic message. Some persons present expressed delight that he was residing in Montgomery.

About four months later, on December 1, Rosa Parks was arrested for having taken a seat in the "white only" section of a city bus and refusing to relinquish it when asked to do so by the white bus driver. King was one of the black leaders who responded to Parks' arrest and Jo Ann Robinson's and some other members of the Women's Political Council call for action dealing with Parks' arrest. On the next day about fifteen leaders met at King's Dexter Avenue Baptist Church and decided that black people should be urged to boycott city busses on Monday, the day of Parks' trial. Leaflets announcing the bus boycottand a Monday evening mass meeting to be held at the Holt Street Baptist Church were distributed by black leaders and ministers announced from their pulpits that Sunday that black people would be boycotting busses on Monday. The Sunday "Montgomery-Advetiser" featured a front-page article by Joe Azbell titled, "Negro Groups Ready Boycott of Bus Lines." On Monday morning the buses were nearly empty with only a few black people seen riding them. That morning Judge John B. Scott found Rosa Parks guilty of having violated Montgomery's segregation ordinance and fined her $14.00. Her attorney Fred Gray stated that he would appeal the decision.

That Monday afternoon eighteen black leaders met at the Mt. Zion A.M.E. Zion Church and after some engaging discussion Abernathy suggested that we organize the Montgomery Improvement Association to provide leadership for addressing the bus problem and other concerns of the black people of Montgomery. King was elected president, I, Uriah J. Fields, was elected secretary and E.D. Nixon was elected to be the treasurer of the newly formed organzation. Later that evening a hugh crowd of more than 4,000 people gathered in and aroun the Holt Street Baptist Church. At that meeting King delivered a powerful message and the people voted, upon recommendation from their leaders, to continue the bus boycott until, as Abernathy put it, "some other arrangement can be made with city and bus line officials regardng the treatment of black bus riders."

Events taking place on that Monday, December 5, 1955, launched King on the road to prominence. He had been given a charge by the black people of Montgomery and, as providence would have it, he daringly faced the challenge to lead the bus boycott that lasted 382 days, ending only after the United States Supreme Court, on December 17, 1956 declared that the bus segregation laws of Alabama were unconstitutional. This was also the beginning of a new life for King, a life that would be characterized by threats, jailings, beatings, bombing of his parsonage, church bombings, and mental anguish resulting, in part, from his awareness of the suffering black Montgomerians were enduring as a result of the bus boycott. But it would also be the beginning of his leadership to do something that no other black person had ever been able to do, i.e., to raise black people to a level of achievement where they would gain access to the ballot, public facilities, "white only" jobs, state universities and open housing. Even though he would experience physical torture, including being stabbbed by a black woman, Mrs. Izola Ware Curry, while in New York, and spared, as he put it while speaking in Memphis and recounting his stabbing, "I want to say tonight that I too am happy that I didn't sneeze. Because if I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been around here in 1960, when students all over the South started sitting-in at lunch counters. ....If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been in Memphis to see a great community rally around those brothers and sisters who are suffering.... Now it dosen't matter now. It really dosen't matter what happens now."

But King was embraced by millions of black and white liberals. He influenced President John F. Kennedy and President Lyndon B. Johnson to address the issue of civil rights for black Americans. Following the March on Washington and the delivery of his miss-named "I Have a Dream" speech during that occasion President Johnson took seriously Kings plea for presidential involvement in the civil rights struggle and, more than any other president before or since him he fought for black civil rights. His leadership resulted in the passage of three Civil Rights Acts that extended to black people the vote without contingency, access to desegregated public facilities and open housing.

In 1964 King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. When his wife Coretta informed him that he had been chosen to receive the award he was confined to the St. Joseph's Infirmary and was suffering from over-exhaustion, high blood pressure and depression. Speaking to reporters who had gathered that Wednesday at St. Joseph's Infirmary he said, "It would both be immoral and a sign of ingratitude if I did not face my moral responsibility to do what I can in this struggle.
Indeed, he continued to be engaged in the struggle, speaking-out for economic justice, against the Vietnam War, despite his appreciation for what President Johnson had done to further the civil rights of black people, and to lead marches aimed at destroying segregation and decreasing poverty. King was in Memphis readying himself to participate in another mass march to support a strike by black sanitation workers that had begun on February 12 when he was asssassinated on April 4, 1968. Later it was determined by the Government that James Earl Ray killed him, but there is copious evidence that it was a white racist conspiracy that killed King.

The Congress of the United States and President Ronald Reagan honored King posthumously when they approved of the National Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday that is observed on the third Monday of January, a day occurring on or shortly after his January 15 bithday. It is intended that this holiday will remind Americans of the contribution King made, not just to the cause of black people but to the cause of all Americans and of the need for Americans to cherish his legacy and make certain that it is held in perpetuity.

As beneficiaries of King's good works and legacy let us enter the Third Millennium with an awareness that "Time" magazine's 1956 "Man of the Year" is America's "Man of the Century." and may his legacy inspire all Americans durng this first century of the new millennium to advance black life and the quality of life for all Americans who continue to be treated unjustly to the level where they will experience equality of opportunity, equality of participatiion and equality of achievement. When this happens King's Dream and the American Dream will be living realities.
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{Because Martin Luther King dared to "fight the good fight" for justice,
Barack Obama, sixty years after King's death, is President of the United States. Hopefully, as a nation, we will become one people, neither black or white. This will happen when there is "justice for all."}

Copyright 2000/2009 by Uriah J. Fields