TWO years ago this week, on the bleak balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, black America lost its greatest modern-day leader. In the death of Martin Luther King Jr., the entire nation also lost a part of its conscience—a very human scale by which to weigh its commitment to racial justice. Bewildered whites dedicated to nonviolence wondered to whom they could now relate when they thought—as they did perhaps all too rarely—about blacks. For a time, blacks reacted with inevitable rage as well as sorrow, and agonized over their lack of leadership.
Today most blacks and thoughtful whites have...