Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

Into this cultural reality Martin Luther King, Jr., was born on January15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia. He dedicated his short but dramatic life to thefight for civil rights, the fight against poverty and for world peace. By thetime he was twenty-eight years old, he was world famous. His leadershipin the Montgomery bus boycotts and thereafter in the Southern ChristianLeadership Council paved the way for a nation-wide civil rights movement.A Baptist minister, with a doctoral degree in philosophy from BostonUniversity, he was devoted to Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent movement asthe path for social change. From the lunch counter and restaurant sit-ins in1960, to the Birmingham demonstrations in 1962, the march on Washingtonin 1963, the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, and the voter registration march fromSelma, Alabama, to Montgomery, Alabama, the Poor People’s Campaign,and the anti-Vietnam War movement in 1967–1968, King worked to realizethe words he spoke in his Nobel lecture on December 11, 1964, in Oslo:Mankind’s survival is dependent upon man’s ability to solve theproblems of racial injustice, poverty, and war; the solution of theseproblems is in turn dependent upon man’s squaring his moralprogress with his scientific progress, and learning the practical artof living in harmony. We have inherited a big house, a great “worldhouse,” in which we have to live together—black and white, Easternersand Westerners, Gentiles and Jews, Catholic and Protestants,Moslem and Hindu, a family unduly separated in ideas, culture andinterests, who, because we can never again live without each other,must learn, somehow, in this one big world to live with each other. 12Just as the first stage of Whitman’s vision of America was not realizedfor all, so do the second and third stages remain goals for the future. King’s“War on Poverty” was a beginning, amongst other beginnings in the 1960s,of the realization of material welfare and harmony for all Americans. Hisefforts to end the Vietnam War and to work for world peace, which werealso left incomplete, carried seeds for a productive spiritual and cultural lifein America in the future, as Whitman envisioned in his third stage. Whatrole a fifty-five-year-old King could have played in today’s world peacemovement remains an open question. The possibility for this was removedon April 4, 1968, when King was shot down on the balcony of his hotel inMemphis, Tennessee.On the night before he died, King addressed a hot and crowdedaudience at the Mason Street Temple. He had come to town to support314