LIVING HIS LEGACY KING CHANGED THE VERY FABRIC OF AMERICA.

Byline: EARL O. HUTCHINSON

TWO weeks before the annual Martin Luther King Jr. national holiday, Mississippi prosecutors dragged aging, frail Edgar Ray Killen into court and charged him in the murder of three civil-rights workers in 1964. Their murders shook the nation and shamed and embarrassed the government. That gave King, and the civil-rights leaders, the conscience-stirring act they badly needed to batter down the last barriers of segregation.

But things were much simpler in those days.

Civil-rights leaders were hailed as martyrs and American heroes in the fight for racial justice. They had the sympathy and good will of millions of whites, politicians and business leaders. They had Lyndon Baines Johnson, a liberal Democrat, in the White House. He shouted and believed in ``We Shall Overcome,'' the slogan of the civil-rights movement. They regarded him as a real friend. The gory news images of baton-wielding racist Southern sheriffs, fire hoses and police dogs, and Klan violence unleashed against peaceful black protesters sickened many white Americans. All, except the most rabid racists, considered racial segregation immoral and indefensible.

However, as America unraveled in the late 1960s in the anarchy of urban riots, campus takeovers and anti-war street battles, the civil-rights movement and its leaders fell apart, too. Many of them fell victim to their own success and failure. When they broke down the racially restricted doors of corporations, government agencies and universities, middle-class blacks, not the black poor, were the ones who rushed headlong through them. As King embroiled himself in anti-war, poverty and labor organizing, he became a political pariah to the White House and mainstream black leaders.

King's murder in 1968 was the turning point for race relations in America. The transformation of the old-line civil-rights groups such as the NAACP into business- and professional-friendly organizations left the black poor fragmented and politically rudderless. The black poor, lacking competitive technical skills and professional training - and shunned by many middle-class black leaders - were shoved even further to the outer margins of American society.

It hasn't gotten any better since then. The chronic problems of gang and drug violence, family breakdown, the soaring incarceration rate of young black males, the mounting devastation of HIV and AIDS in black communities and abysmally failing inner-city public schools have devastated poor black communities.

The old civil-rights organizations, in their reformed state, have been powerless to halt the slide. King's old organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, has been wracked by bitter leadership infighting, threatened lawsuits and allegations of financial improprieties. The NAACP is undergoing yet another shift as it seeks a new leader, and the SNCC has long since disappeared.

Even if these groups were stable, financially healthy, and effective civil-rights fighters, they would still face towering problems. The Sept. 11 terror attacks, the Iraq war, mounting state and federal deficits and the reluctance (even denial) of many Americans to talk about racial problems, have pushed civil rights to the far back burner of national concerns.

If that's not bad enough, many blacks continue to charge that Republicans cheated black voters out of thousands of votes in Florida and hijacked the White House. Though there's no proof that Republicans rigged the vote in Ohio, black leaders such as Jesse Jackson complain that Republicans disenfranchised thousands of blacks and hijacked the White House again in 2004. The old guard civil-rights leaders have even called for massive protests at Bush's inaugural.

The other reality that King didn't have to face is that race matters in America can no longer be framed exclusively as a black and white conflict. Latinos have replaced blacks as the leading minority group in America. They are vigorously courted, and wooed by Republicans and Democrats, and as their numbers grow even bigger, so will their political and economic clout.

Then there are the political divisions that have torn blacks.

In King's day, black conservatives were invisible or nonexistent. They aren't today. They are active, and outspoken in opposing welfare, government spending programs, abortion and black violence. They have turned the few stray remarks that King made on affirmative action and his advocacy of a colorblind society to oppose affirmative action. In an even more bizarre twist, some civil-rights activists and black evangelical leaders, including Bernice King, King's daughter, have used King's name to oppose gay rights.

The civil-rights struggle is now the stuff of nostalgia, history books and the memoirs of aging former civil-rights leaders, and rightly so. Times have changed, and changed drastically. King and the civil-rights movement did much to usher in those changes, and they have made race relations in America more diverse and open, and at the same time, more complex and challenging.

That's a reality that we should embrace and be proud of, and one that does not require that we overcome.

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Photo:

(color) Schoolchildren sign a banner Thursday after an event in Everett, Wash., to celebrate diversity, in honor of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, which will be observed Monday.

Ted S. Warren/Associated Press