Martin Luther King day

A few years ago, when a new administration had come in, a friend of mine was reputed to be among the men being considered for the ambassadorship to London. He was, of course, initially flattered but he knew that London was a capital city housing perhaps the largest number of embassies of any other capital – something, I believe, between 150 and 190 embassies or ministries or consulates.

Each of these countries has at least one day a year that is a national holiday commemorating an historic leader or, more often, since the huge break-up of the colonial empires, commemorating their day of independence. Now if there's one ambassador to Britain who is expected to put in an appearance, even a mere how-de-doo, on the days of these national festivals, it is the American ambassador.

My friend didn't take long to weigh this daunting calendar of duties. He figured that about half the evenings of every year would be booked up before he moved into Grosvenor Square. Before he received the call, he took himself out of the running.

Of course these ceremonies have to be reciprocated. Those 150-plus ambassadors and ministers have to be asked back. Luckily, the United States, while it has technically no national holidays, had one day which, above all others, signifies the arrival of the historical scene of a new nation, namely the Fourth of July, Independence Day, and every American ambassador throws a big party on that day at the residence in any given capital.

I should explain the seeming puzzle of my saying that the United States has technically no national holidays. Each of the 50 states has jurisdiction over its public holidays. It's up to the state legislatures, or the governor, by proclamation to name them. In practice, most states follow the legal holidays of the federal government, but even here, the president and the Congress can designate holidays only for the District of Columbia, the federal district that surrounds the capital, Washington – hence Washington DC.

However for most of this century most holidays granted to federal, to government, employees are honoured also by the states and those – in effect – national holidays are New Year's Day, Washington's Birthday, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Columbus Day, Veterans' (formerly Armistice) Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas.

You'll notice that throughout all the 200 years of American history as an independent nation, only two men have been honoured with this distinction – Christopher Columbus, for having discovered the continent and George Washington for being the founding president.

Lincoln, you'll see, is missing because even now, while most northern states declare his birthday to be a holiday, even now, 120 years after the Civil War ended, the South does not recognise Lincoln's birthday as cause for celebration. And there's no Jefferson Day, no Franklin Day, no Madison Day, no Andrew Jackson Day, no Roosevelt – either Theodore or Franklin – Day.

But now, a third man has, by act of Congress and presidential proclamation, been added to the list and given this very rare honour of having all the states pause on his birthday. This is the first year in which the act, the proclamation, comes into force. The date is 20 January and the man is the late Reverend Martin Luther King, Junior. And why?

President Reagan, standing last Wednesday before 350 children at an elementary school in Washington, the Martin Luther King school, told us why. 'Ultimately,' Mr Reagan said, 'the great lesson of Martin Luther King's life was this: he was a great man who wrested justice from the heart of a great country and he succeeded because that great country had a heart to be seized.'

These are heady words and surprising words coming from the man who spoke them. Mr Reagan was against most of the civil rights' acts that grew out of the Reverend King's defiance of the American form of apartheid known as segregation, which was famously struck down by a ruling of the Supreme Court in May 1954. Let me... let me remind you of the deceptive simplicity of that case.

A black man, Oliver Brown, in Topeka, Kansas, sued the city's school board for forbidding his eight-year-old daughter to go to a white school a few blocks away, forcing her instead to cross railway yards and take a bus to a black school 21 blocks away. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court which overthrew a doctrine that had guided its judgments in such racial matters for 62 years. It was the doctrine that blacks were entitled to separate, but equal rights – education, for instance. Of course, it was separate but very rarely equal.

At any rate, that 1954 ruling said that the separation of white and black children in public education violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution which promises the equal protection of the laws. The majority decision contained the stunning phrase, 'the constitution is colour-blind'. That was the beginning of the black revolution. The Southern states – and several northern industrial states – did not take this judgment lying down. For years they wriggled through many ingenuous legal loopholes to justify segregation in their state, their town, their county.

A year after the historic case of Brown versus the school board of Topeka, Kansas, I went south to see how it was affecting the old embedded traditions of separate schools, separate restaurants, theatres, buses, lavatories, so on. In December of 1955, four Negroes, as we then called them, got on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama and sat in its forward section. This was a flexible area marked off by cards that snapped on to the central poles. The back section behind the cards was for blacks.

The driver asked the four to move there. Three of them complied, but the fourth, a woman, said no. A city law compelled the driver to move her and when she refused, two policemen were called in. She was arrested.

That night, thousands of printed handbills dropped on the doorsteps of black homes urging a boycott of the bus line. It started on 5 December 1955 and it is a date as pregnant with the prospect of social change as the 1954 Supreme Court ruling, for the organisers of the bus boycott were tried for conspiracy and convicted.

They were out on bail when I went to Montgomery in the spring of 1956 and walked into the Mount Zion African Episcopal Methodist church, in a shambling dark town, to attend one of their rallies. I was, need I say, the only white man in this heaving, singing, roaring black congregation. They had come to honour, short of worship, the leader of the boycott, a young bland, black man with solemn good looks. He was, then, the almost totally unknown, Reverend Martin Luther King.

He read to them a constitution, designed only then to ensure respect for the indignity of the individual with respect to the bus company, but for these people it was the first declaration of independence. There was a final prayer and a rolling hymn and the meeting broke up in ecstasy and good order.

Another black parson told me with great gravity, 'God took time to prepare him a leader and, having looked, he chose him a man, young, wise, dynamic and Christian'.

Well, all the world knows of the battles through the following years with every kind of white establishment and city ordnance and state law. I hope it was not uncharitable of me listening to Mr Reagan's proud words the other day to wish he had, at least, said that he had once opposed integration, opposed the civil rights' laws, originally was against making Dr King's birthday a national holiday.

Lyndon Johnson did it better. He initiated the great Civil Rights Act of his presidency and to get it through Congress, he gathered and bullied and cajoled and lectured his oldest Southern friends in Congress and said, 'I was brought up as you were. Negroes were a separate and lower part of life, but they have read the Constitution. They want to be equal, they are right. That is the way America is going and we must go with it.'

Later, after all these black struggles and marches and riots in which Dr King was in the forefront till he was murdered in Memphis in 1968, I wrote then that, as a reporter strictly, I was not sure than an integrated society would work. I suspected that the blacks will get no more than the mass of whites is willing to give them. I was not sanguine then. I never dreamed that the mass of whites were changing much and that we should be able to read anything like the results of a survey that has appeared this week.

It is, in fact, a summary of three surveys done by the Institute for Social Research of the University of Michigan, conducted through 40 years. The first was taken in the early Forties, the second in the early Sixties, the third in the past two years. They make engrossing and, to me, heartening reading.

They're about the changing attitudes of whites towards racial equality over 40 years. Forty years ago, 32 per cent of whites felt that white and black students should go to the same school. Today, 90 per cent. Twenty years ago, one white in three believed they had a right to keep blacks out of their neighbourhoods. Today, only one in ten. In 1944, just under half of all whites thought blacks should have equal job opportunities. Today, 97 per cent.

Of course the whites who stir up the fusses, and maybe the fires, over these matters are those three per cent, ten per cent. They get active and violent. They make better television pictures than the 97 per cent, the 90 per cent who have come to accept the blacks' equal rights in this society.

The most astonishing statistic that was coincidentally released this week brought glum news to Democrats. When Mr Reagan was elected in 1980, only 12 per cent of blacks approved of him. Today, by what alchemy even the politicians cannot say, 56 per cent of all blacks think Mr Reagan is doing a good job as president.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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