Martin Luther King, Jr. is the Leader We Need
Martin Luther King, Jr. stressed our common humanity, which would have made him unpopular with almost everyone today.
In 1901, the tomb of Abraham Lincoln underwent a renovation and the murdered ex-president had to be exhumed and re-buried. Lincoln’s reputation around the world at the time was such that a German statesman named Ernst von Stackelberg traveled to the estate of 73-year-old Leo Tolstoy to ask him to write an article in commemoration. Tolstoy declined, but gave an extraordinary opinion about the American.
Lincoln, said Tolstoy, was “a Christ in miniature, a saint of humanity, whose name will live thousands of years in the legends of future generations.” The American “had come through many hardships and much experience to the realization that the greatest human achievement is love.” Commenting on his assassination, the writer noted that “Christ had a presentiment of his death, and there are indications that also Lincoln had strange dreams and presentiments of something tragic.”
There is another great American who had a strange presentiment of death. On April 3, 1968, a day before he was murdered, Martin Luther King, Jr., whose birthday we celebrate today, ended a speech with a note of sadness. Like any person, King said, he would like to live longer, for “longevity has its place” — that line has stuck with me since youth — but he wasn’t afraid, for he’d been to the mountaintop. He exited quoting verse from Lincoln’s time, “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord”:
We live in a desperate moment, in a country that feels rudderless. Once, people were content to lean on long-dead figures in such times, like Moses, the Buddha, Christ, or Mohammed. The modern person tends to see this as supersitious weakness, but isn’t stronger for it. I think we still need leaders. I don’t know how popular Martin Luther King, Jr. would be today. The right might disagree with his politics, the left with his spirituality. I don’t presume to know, but when I sit down tonight to talk about him with my children, I’ll tell them what he’s meant to me:
