Three thoughts about Martin Luther King Jr.

1. Martin Luther King Jr. was the most important of probably a couple of dozen leaders of the US civil rights movement. I love Martin Luther King Jr., but it's important to remember that he was no Jesus figure, taking on the world by himself. He was the public face of a broad movement that got its energy from countless people who fought back against segregation in little ways and big. As he wrote in "Letter from Birmingham Jail":

One day the South will recognize its real heroes. They will be the James Merediths, courageously and with a majestic sense of purpose facing jeering and hostile mobs and the agonizing loneliness that characterizes the life of the pioneer. They will be old, oppressed, battered Negro women, symbolized in a seventy-two-year-old woman of Montgomery, Alabama, who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride the segregated buses, and responded to one who inquired about her tiredness with ungrammatical profundity, "My feets is tired, but my soul is rested." They will be young high school and college students, young ministers of the gospel and a host of their elders courageously and nonviolently sitting in at lunch counters and willingly going to jail for conscience's sake. One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters they were in reality standing up for the best in the American dream and the most sacred values in our Judeo-Christian heritage.

Amen, brother.

2. MLK was an inspirational figure because of his soaring rhetoric and his use of civil disobedience. But behind that inspirational figure was a cold, calculating politician. He didn't just wake up one morning and decide it was time to march in Birmingham or Chicago. He plotted. If we march in Birmingham, how will the police respond? What are our demands? Can we win? We must win to maintain the momentum of our movement. What should be our position on Vietnam? On the War on Poverty? How do I negotiate my relationship with LBJ, allying with him on civil rights legislation but breaking with him on the war? How do I keep the nonviolent movement together in the face of pressure from Stokely Carmichael and his ilk?

3. In the end, he failed. Yes, achieved monumental civil rights legislation that changed the character of our country forever. Yes, helped tear down the wall of segregation and prejudice. But the civil rights movement broke apart with various strands of black power challenging his more mainstream movement. He couldn't stop the riots in northern cities or the white backlash against civil rights and anti-poverty programs. He couldn't stop the war. At his death the country was more bitterly divided than when the civil rights movement began. The power of love was no match for the forces of fear and hatred. Once again it was countless people who looked up to MLK and were inspired by him who in the years after his death began to heal wounds and advance the cause of justice.

Nobody's a bigger fan of Martin Luther King Jr. than I am. But I wonder if we would be better served by a holiday celebrating all the ordinary people who took the leap, challenging segregation, standing for principle, allowing their hearts to be changed, to help this country live up to its ideals.