But as residents wile away the hours at play, their eyes are sometimes drawn to one of the park’s most intriguing features, a sculpture titled A Landmark for Peace. The memorial, placed in the park in 1995, was designed and executed by the late Indiana artist Greg Perry, and the bronze portraits were completed by Indianapolis sculptor Daniel Edwards. It is a monument to what happened in the park one day in 1968, as well as what didn’t, and, as its name suggests, it is also a statement about peace and the possibility of conversation.

The memorial features two curved panels facing one another, with the figure of a different man near the top of each panel. The men reach their arms out toward each other, though they don’t quite touch.

The two figures are Martin Luther King Jr. and the former junior U.S. senator from the state of New York, Robert F. Kennedy. Though they met in real life, they never met physically in this park. Still, they are forever bound together here, and in Indiana and American history, as well.

April 4, 1968 was a cold and windy evening, and a crowd numbering in the thousands gathered at Seventeenth and Broadway streets for an outdoor rally. At first, people, predominantly African-American, appeared to be in a festive mood. And why not? The audience would be among the first citizens of the Hoosier State to hear a speech from Robert Kennedy, a newly declared presidential candidate, who had announced his run for the Democratic Party’s nomination for president just two weeks before. Arriving late in the race for the nomination, Kennedy had decided to take his case directly to the people, by winning primary elections, instead of just maneuvering for nomination at the summer convention.

Many African-Americans had moved to Indianapolis in the time after World War II. Those who came North to live there had to deal with some of the same problems they had faced in the South, including segregation in education, housing, and public accommodations. But in Indianapolis, these subjects were not often confronted publicly. The Indianapolis Urban League and the local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People preferred negotiating quietly behind the scenes with local power brokers, both Democratic and Republican, to secure change. Among the crowd gathered at Seventeenth and Broadway streets for the Kennedy rally, however, were some people who had grown tired of the choices offered by America’s two political parties and were preparing for more radical action.

Kennedy’s advisers had cautioned him against entering the Indiana primary. They saw the state as too conservative, pointing to the strength of the Ku Klux Klan in the state during the 1920s, the fact that John Kennedy had run more than 200,000 votes behind Republican Richard Nixon in the 1960 presidential election in Indiana, and the strong showing of the segregationist, Alabama Governor George Wallace, in parts of Indiana in the 1964 primary. Kennedy’s anti-war views would also clash with Hoosier politics, as Indianapolis was home to the national headquarters of the American Legion and the place where Robert Welch Jr. founded the ultra-conservative John Birch Society to fight the supposed communist infiltration of the American government.

Jules Witcover, who covered every presidential campaign since the early 1960s, recalled being put off by the fact that Indianapolis was home to two huge war memorials (the Indiana War Memorial and the Soldiers and Sailors Monument). He spoke the feelings of many national media figures about Indiana in 1968 when he commented: “Were a Martian to land his flying saucer in Monument Circle, he might well take one look, climb back in and beat a fast retreat.”

Before traveling to Indianapolis, Kennedy had made two other campaign stops that day. During a question-and-answer session following his speech at Ball State University in Muncie, a young black man had asked Kennedy whether he could justify his belief in the good faith of white people toward minorities. The candidate answered that the majority of people in the country wanted to do “the decent and the right thing.”

As Kennedy boarded the plane for Indianapolis, he was informed that Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had been supporting the city’s striking sanitation workers.

When he arrived at Indianapolis’s Weir Cook Municipal Airport, Kennedy learned that the civil rights leader had died. Thinking back to the answer he had given at Ball State, a distraught Kennedy told a Newsweek reporter that it grieved him that he had “just told that kid this and then walk(ed) out and (found out) that some white man had just shot their spiritual leader.”

Word of King’s death was just beginning to reach people in Indianapolis, and some young black activists in the crowd who were waiting to see Kennedy began gathering support for violent action.

William Crawford, later a longtime state representative from Indianapolis and a formidable figure at the Indiana Statehouse, was, at the time of Kennedy’s appearance, a member of an organization known as the Radical Action Program. He and his friends were very close, he recalled, to resorting to violence as a way register their grief and rage at the loss of the civil rights leader. By one estimate, nearly 200 militants were sprinkled throughout the crowd. Those responsible for local arrangements for the speech, including respected Black Power leader Charles “Snooky” Hendricks, grew so fearful that Kennedy’s life might be in danger that they recruited people to check the area for possible assassins.

After a brief statement on King’s death to the press assembled at the airport, Kennedy climbed into a car that would take him to the rally, jotting down some notes on what he might say on the back of an envelope.

John Bartlow Martin, an Indianapolis native and close adviser to Kennedy during the campaign for the Indiana primary, saw a local police inspector parked at the curb outside the hotel where the candidate’s wife was waiting for him to return from the rally. Martin went up to the car and asked the officer if the candidate should go ahead and address the crowd. “He said, with a fervor I imagine was rare in him, ‘I sure hope he does. If he doesn’t, there’ll be hell to pay.’”

Arriving at the rally, Kennedy, wearing a black overcoat that had belonged to his brother John, climbed onto a flatbed truck located in a parking lot near the basketball court. After asking for those waving signs and banners to put them down, he informed the crowd that King had been killed. The audience, which had been anticipating a raucous political event and for the most part had been unaware of the shooting, responded to the announcement with gasps, shrieks, and cries of “No, No.”

Tom Keating, a police reporter for the Indianapolis Star, who had raced to the scene with two policemen, noted that the crowd reacted to the news almost like “a wounded animal” and called the event one of the most “supercharged” he had ever witnessed.

Facing the now stunned audience, some of whom were weeping at their loss, Kennedy gave an impassioned, extemporaneous, six-minute speech on the need for compassion in the face of violence.

Kennedy recalled the words of Aeschylus, the Greek tragedian whose words from Agamemnon had comforted him following the assassination of his brother, President John F. Kennedy: “He (Aeschylus) once wrote: ‘Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.’” He attempted to calm the crowd’s growing anger about King’s killing with words that have been commended by historians as some of the finest of the modern American era:

“What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black. . . .

“Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.”

The news of King’s violent death at the hands of a white gunman, James Earl Ray, had sparked outrage and violence across the country. But in Indianapolis the crowd at Seventeenth and Broadway had taken Kennedy’s words to heart and quietly left the rally and returned home. “We walked away in pain but not with a sense of revenge,” said Crawford.

The post Why MLK and RFK Are Forever Bound Together in an Indianapolis Park appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

The post Why Martin Luther King Saw His Life as a Sacrifice appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

A decade later, in 1930, in his most famous and dramatic campaign—the salt satyagraha—Gandhi again used mass protest to make visible the illegitimacy of British rule. This time the tool was mass civil disobedience. Gandhi asked Indians to defy the salt tax, the government monopoly on the production and sale of salt. Disobeying this tax was too innocuous to justify violent state repression. But when undertaken on a mass scale it also proved impossible to ignore. Moreover, the salt tax disproportionately burdened the poor and became an evocative symbol of British disregard for Indian lives and interests.

Gandhi began the salt satyagraha by leading a group of his closest associates in a thrilling 25-day, 240-mile march. Each day the suspense around Gandhi’s imminent arrest and popular unrest excited public attention. The campaign culminated in nationwide boycotts and demonstrations with thousands upon thousands of arrests. Moreover, graphic accounts of the brutal beating of unarmed protestors circulated in the global media, turning public opinion against the British and bringing Gandhi and satyagraha to the world’s attention.

In the century since, satyagraha has become better known as nonviolent direct action or simply nonviolence, and it has spread globally, establishing itself as a potent force in the U.S. civil rights movement, the anti-authoritarian struggles of the 1980s and 1990s such as the “people power” movement in the Philippines and Czechoslovakia’s “Velvet Revolution,” and the Arab Spring of 2011. And yet, for all its success, what exactly nonviolent action is, and how it works, has become less and less clear, an ambiguity that could hamper its usefulness in a landscape increasingly characterized by intense economic and political polarization.

Rev. Ralph Abernathy, left, and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., right, are taken by a policeman as they led a line of demonstrators into the business section of Birmingham, Ala., on April 12, 1963. Courtesy of Associated Press.

When we picture nonviolent protest today, we tend to imagine vast crowds occupying public spaces, marching, waving signs, chanting slogans, confronting state authority. For Gandhi, however, nonviolent protest required something more than the peaceful mobilization of large numbers of people. Its aim was not just to pressure the state but to move political opponents to rethink their positions and commitments. And to do that, Gandhi believed that protestors had to display and demonstrate disciplined fearlessness and a willingness to sacrifice. It was this kind of commitment that would work to persuade a political opponent by “opening his ears, which are otherwise shut, to the voice of reason.”

But is such a process of political persuasion truly possible? Ironically, nonviolence’s global popularity has increased alongside a decline of conviction in the power of nonviolent persuasion. Both the meaning of the word “nonviolence” and the concept of nonviolence itself have become ambiguous in the years since Gandhi’s great successes.

Nowhere is this clearer than India, where nonviolence is so closely associated with Gandhi himself that it’s difficult to ask serious questions about it. For the left, nonviolence is associated with Gandhi’s Hindu-nationalism and his gradualistic approach to caste and economic reforms. In this context, nonviolence seems conservative, even reactionary. From the right, nonviolence is seen as weak, emasculated nationalism. And even Gandhians themselves insist that nonviolence is a way of life that would be disfigured by treating it as a political tactic. Thus, the wider argument about what Gandhi represents in India has obscured questions about the value and meaning of nonviolence there.

Globally, nonviolence has become defined as a set of universal and portable political techniques, but its goals have changed significantly over time. The first generation of activists shaped the nonviolence of the civil rights movement in the U.S. and the anti-nuclear protests in the U.K. They successfully built up a repertoire of protest techniques that captured and developed core elements of Gandhi’s original project. Successful nonviolent direct action came to be defined by two key aspects: disruption and discipline.

Disruption on a mass scale is without doubt the most celebrated feature of nonviolent resistance. Non-cooperation and large-scale civil disobedience, by using tactics like the mass boycott, can draw attention to unjust laws. Consider the bus boycotts and lunch counter sit-ins of the civil rights movement, which so effectively exposed the indignities of segregation. In both cases, the symbolic elements were tied closely to practical experiments in interrupting day-to-day activities.

In this iconic image published in The New York Times on May 4, 1963, a 17-year-old high school student is attacked by a police dog in Birmingham, Ala.
Photo by Bill Hudson/Associated Press.

Over time, we have learned that nonviolence can draw participation from large numbers of people more effectively and efficiently than armed movements ever could. By either withdrawing participation and popular consent or criticizing and defying specific institutions and laws deemed unjust, successful nonviolent campaigns can puncture the legitimacy and authority of the state as such.

For protests to be nonviolent, however, disruption itself has to be disciplined. Protestors have to show restraint, often through a willingness to sacrifice and suffer. This includes everything from the discipline of walking and marching for weeks to stoically resisting the provocation and violence of police and vigilante groups. Instilling this kind of discipline and restraint were the main focus of the nonviolent training sessions and the codes of conduct that both Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. insisted upon when they embarked on large-scale campaigns. The need for discipline also informed the preference for silence, prayer, and song over fiery speeches and the shouting of slogans in nonviolent protests.

In Gandhi and King’s view, disciplined action would dramatize injustice and awaken moral conscience. For Gandhi discipline showed self-mastery; for King it showed dignity. For both men these moral ideals were key to the political and strategic success of the protests, which could force a recalcitrant opponent or public to stop and look critically at themselves, to ask whether their commitments and practices match their ideals. While confrontation, intimidation, or coercion might force opponents to reckon with protesters, only nonviolence had the potential to convert opponents.

The more confrontational the tactic—when the threat of provoking violence was at hand—the more crucial it was for nonviolent protest to maintain discipline. This unique combination would confuse and off-balance state responses to insurgent protest, as was powerfully demonstrated during Gandhi’s salt satyagraha and King’s Birmingham campaign.

Nonviolence entered a new era after King’s assassination, when radical social movements gained traction, and the importance of discipline and restraint dramatically declined in the late 1960s. To my mind, this has been the most fundamental but overlooked shift in the theory and practice of nonviolence. Partly out of confidence, partly out of impatience, radical protest instead celebrated what were considered to be more confrontational, transgressive, and authentic expressions of dissent and opposition. The nonviolence of Gandhi and King, with its emphasis on restraint, suffering, sacrifice, and persuasion, was increasingly characterized as a principled commitment to nonviolence but not a strategically successful one.

Nonviolent theorists and activists, including the influential Gene Sharp, today advocate for a more narrowly conceived “strategic” nonviolence. They celebrate the disruptive, confrontational, militant aspects of the history of nonviolence. And in so doing, what counts as nonviolence has expanded, most often in the direction of more elastic definitions, to the point where anything short of armed rebellion seems to count as nonviolent.

Clearly, collective programs of disruption have proven especially effective at undermining state legitimacy and toppling authoritarian regimes. This was the core lesson of the successive protest strategies of the velvet revolutions from Eastern Europe to Tahrir Square. And extreme or confrontational tactics, like those pioneered by AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) in the 1980s and ’90s, can draw attention to injustice and build solidarity within a movement.

But in turbulent political times, when the primary goal of protest might well be to overcome polarization by reaching out to and persuading fellow citizens, disruption may prove much less useful. In India today, for example, Gandhian-style nonviolent marches still take place but they’re paradoxically used by political parties to intimidate and provoke. Whether these are genuinely nonviolent is rarely discussed. Even Anna Hazare’s famous fast against corruption broke most of Gandhi’s explicit rules because it was coercive.

In a time of escalating inequalities and resentments, we need to find a politics that enables us to relate to fellow citizens with dignity. To do this we should recover the lost traits of nonviolent discipline and restraint, remembering that nonviolence cannot simply be a symbolic or rhetorical gesture. The details of the organization and enactment of protests create a space for the difficult work of persuasion to take place, creating potential for a shared democratic political life. At its best, this disciplined nonviolent action can incite a reluctant populace to engage in acts of moral re-evaluation, repairing some of our divisions.

The post How India’s Nonviolent Resistance Became a Shifting Global Movement appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It was not a skill that I developed. I woke up one day and realized I could speak in the same rich voice, with the same baritone and rhythm that Dr. King used. I have never been sure that I would always have this ability, but miraculously it has not wavered. I started in 1969, a year after King’s death, and have been quoting and performing his speeches for 47 years.

I’m now 71, well beyond the 39 years King lived, but I remember well the first time I performed my rendition of a Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. speech, at the Dootsie Williams Dooto Music Center on Central Avenue in Compton. At the time, I was employed by the Compton Fire Department (and was the only black person in the department) and was moonlighting as the chauffeur for Compton Mayor Douglas F. Dollarhide. While I drove him around, I recited the “I Have a Dream” speech for him, attempting to sound like Dr. King. He liked it well enough to suggest putting me on the program as a speaker at the annual NAACP banquet in 1969.

I prepared by listening, over and over, to an LP of Dr. King’s speeches. That first time in 1969, I gave the “I Have a Dream” speech. It was unlike any experience I’d had before. When I spoke, I felt Dr. King’s presence, as though it wasn’t me doing the speaking. Instead, he was speaking through my body. I was merely the instrument the sound came from. I had real goose bumps when I finished.

The speech received a standing ovation. People told me that they thought Dr. King had come back from the grave. They said I looked like him and I sounded just like him. From that night on, I have been reciting his speeches. People respond as though I were him. On occasion, after a performance, people have talked to me or treated me as if I were Dr. King. This is humbling, but it doesn’t feel like a burden. It’s joyful.

My ability is God-given, and it is also—I believe—a product of where I’m from. I grew up in Linden, Alabama, the third of 12 children, and I experienced segregation and integration first hand. I drank from a “colored” water fountain, used a “colored” restroom, and rode in the back of the bus. My younger brother Richard was the first student to integrate Linden Elementary School, and after his first day of school, the Ku Klux Klan came to our home and burned a cross in front of our yard.

After graduating from Linden Academy, the black high school in Linden, I enrolled at Selma University. In 1963, John Lewis, now a Congressman, came to my dorm to recruit students to join the civil rights movement. One way he motivated us was by telling us that Martin Luther King, Jr. was coming to town and we needed to get involved. He told us that we were the ones who would benefit from civil rights, and our children would also be the benefactors. My father warned me not to get involved; he said he sent me to school to get an education, not go to jail. But I, like many other students, joined anyway. I protested and was arrested with Lewis, Dr. King, and others in front of the federal court building in Selma.

In studying the life of Martin Luther King, then and since, I learned one of his most important lessons: In life, there is no crown without a cross. Some people will demonize you and put down your efforts when they don’t like what you do. Dr. King preached and lived that it is God’s will that we look out for the poor and the least among us. When we do this, we should expect confrontation, false accusations, and lies. Some people, such as Dr. King himself, have to face physical death to free others from a permanent psychological death.

Facing lies and danger is not new to our current times; Dr. King taught that pain and misunderstanding are to be expected when fighting injustice. The hardships he endured took a toll on him, but did not discourage him from continuing to preach love and pursue justice.

I have the comfort and honor of sharing King’s voice with people of all backgrounds, ages, and religious affiliations; it is work with particular resonance this time of year, as we celebrate his birthday. I have been pleasantly surprised at how children respond to the recitation of King’s speeches. I’m amazed at their attention span. Even when I’m done they ask for more. There is something about Dr. King’s spirit, determination, and passion for justice that even kindergarteners and first graders get. This brings me immense joy.

Older students respond too. When I taught Civil Rights and the Law at California State University Long Beach in the 1990s, I started each class with a short recitation from Dr. King. My students would come to class a few minutes early to be sure not miss it.

I love all of Dr. King’s speeches—especially “We Shall Overcome” and “I Have a Dream.” But my favorite is a lesser-known address, what I call the “Excellence Speech.” He shared versions of it several times—in Philadelphia in 1960, in Jamaica in June 1965 and at Glenville High School in Cleveland, Ohio on April 26, 1967. He argues that, despite the very real scars that discrimination leaves, racism cannot be an excuse to retreat from the pursuit of excellence. To the contrary, King argues, black people “must set out to achieve excellence in our various fields of endeavor.”

“If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper,” King said, “sweep streets as Raphael painted pictures, sweep streets as Michelangelo carved marble, sweep streets as Beethoven composed music, sweep streets as Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say, ‘Here lived a great street-sweeper who swept his job well.’”

I can wake up in the middle of the night and recite it to anyone who calls.

At the ripe age of 71, I believe that much was given to me in the gift of Dr. King’s voice, but much is still required. I continue to perform his speeches—this week I will deliver excerpts at the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library in the city of Carson near Los Angeles. It is one of the greatest feelings in the world when listeners share how meaningful a speech is, and how I sound just like Dr. King. In my small way, I hope to help his dream live on.

The post How I Became the Voice of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The street portraits of King are made mostly by sign painters, almost never by trained artists. Street portraits of Dr. King don’t last forever. Murals get defaced, paint fades, businesses change hands, and neighborhood demographics shift.

King is typically depicted accompanied by great figures such as Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela, Harriet Tubman, and Rosa Parks (though in recent years I’ve been seeing less of Mandela and Malcolm X).

The slain civil rights leader doesn’t just appear in historically African-American neighborhoods, but appears—reinterpreted—in others as well. I found a version of King in a mural remembering Vincent Chin, a Chinese-American autoworker who was the victim of a racially-motivated murder, in the ruins of Detroit’s former Chinatown. In Los Angeles, King is often depicted in the same style as other brown-skinned Mexicans in street murals by the self-taught sign painters. A friend upon seeing a photo of a mural remarked that he looked like a “Tolteca” Martin Luther King.

Images of King mushroomed on the walls of South Central Los Angeles after the 1992 race riots. In South L.A. in 2016, King is accompanied by Pancho Villa, Benito Juárez, Cesar Chavez, and the Virgin of Guadalupe; most popular since 2009 are portraits of him alongside President Obama. Following population changes, King murals have moved west, across the 110 and toward South Western Avenue. I’ve seen street images of King disappear as his likeness is substituted by the suffering Christ or by President Obama.

As we celebrate a national holiday honoring King, we can enjoy the dialogue he inspires showing how ordinary Angelenos—and other Americans—incorporate him into their culture.

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Nash, somewhat surprisingly, stays in the background throughout much of the film—though an FBI field report excerpt flashed on screen does include her name. She could very well be mistaken as simply being activist James Bevel’s stunningly beautiful wife.

A film has its own narrative needs, and I understand that this one very much wants to remain focused on King. But when I saw Selma, I couldn’t help but think of the hundreds of people laying the groundwork for the demonstrations and developing the strategy months or years before the charismatic leaders and the news cameras showed up on the scene. Nash was one of those important trailblazers—she was the main reason King and his organization were there in Selma in the first place.

I first learned about Nash watching Eyes on the Prize as a college student in the late 1980s. She comes across as one of most extraordinary figures to arise in the student movement. Remarkable footage captures Nash leading a march in Nashville that culminates in a face-to-face confrontation with Mayor Ben West, who’s compelled by Nash to make a grudging admission that he felt segregation was morally wrong. I marveled at this forceful, determined woman who was about my own age, but had a will that far exceeded mine. I’ve come to know her better in recent years as she’s advised a number of civil rights history programs I have created for the Smithsonian Institution.

What strikes me about Nash as she talks about the racial problems she saw a half-century ago (and still sees today) is the powerful anger at injustice that she channeled into non-violent direct action. Hers was an anger tempered by reason, strategic practicality, and a principled belief in peaceful activism. That holds true for many of the veterans of the civil rights movement whom I’ve met: When I hosted Rosa Parks on a tour of the Henry Ford Museum outside Detroit (the eventual home of the bus on which she refused to give up her seat to a white man), she didn’t seem the quiet and composed “Mother Rosa” when talking about injustice. She seemed pissed off.

For Nash, it was the bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church in September 1963 that galvanized her into taking action on voting rights. The tragically famous church where four young girls died going to Sunday School had been a training facility for the Birmingham “Children’s Crusade” organized by Bevel.

Nash and her husband had been wrestling with the fact that their activism put people’s lives at risk ever since they became involved in the civil rights movement in 1960. When integrated groups of young men and women organized by the Congress of Racial Equality to ride buses into the South—the Freedom Riders—got beaten and firebombed by Klansmen in Alabama in the spring of 1961, Nash, a co-founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, could have just decided it was too dangerous and stayed away since it was conceived by another civil rights organization. Instead, with Nashville student organizers Bernard Lafayette and (now congressman) John Lewis, she recruited volunteers to continue the rides. When news reached Washington, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who was eager to keep embarrassing racial violence off the front pages, demanded, “Who the hell is Diane Nash?” and asked his assistant to stop her. But the 23-year-old had made her calculations: The movement was more important than the lives of its organizers.

“If we allowed the Freedom Ride to stop at that point, just after so much violence had been inflicted, the message would have been sent that all you have to do to stop a nonviolent campaign is inflict massive violence,” she remembered.

So when the bomb exploded in Birmingham, Nash told me that she decided that “a grown man and woman with respect for themselves could not let four little girls be murdered and not do anything about it.” They discussed finding those responsible for the bombing and killing them, but decided their efforts were better directed at getting blacks in Alabama the right to vote and changing the faces of those in power. It was possible to upend the power structure in the state’s “black belt,” where a majority of the county’s population was African-American, if not yet making their presence felt in elections. Of the 15,000 or so black people of voting age in Dallas County (where Selma is located), for instance, fewer than 150 were registered to vote.

Nash and Bevel also knew there had been local activists in Selma who would be willing to protest and put their bodies on the line, and so they conceived a step-by-step plan that they presented to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Nash may not have literally driven King into town, but she did bring him there in a figurative sense. She was a leader in negotiating the tense relationship between SNCC and SCLC, addressed demonstrators at Brown Chapel AME Church (the Selma campaign’s headquarters), planned out where protesters would go and when, and organized logistics. When the tear gas and clubs rained down on the peaceful marchers as they tried to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge en route to Montgomery on what came to be known as Bloody Sunday, Nash sent runners out to get the medics. As the final march reached Montgomery, Nash marched the last few blocks with King. In August, after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed, King conferred on her and Bevel the SCLC Freedom Medal for conceiving of the crucial Selma campaign.

Nash’s story reminds us that the civil rights movement wasn’t just about the names in the headlines, but also about the legions of humble citizens on the ground who took action at great risk to themselves. As for Nash, now in her 70s, she is still determined to remind us that this isn’t all ancient history with a tidy beginning, middle, and end—even after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

“That 10 minutes that people spend in the voting booth every two years is not enough,” she told a crowd at the Smithsonian in 2011. “I think back sometimes and wonder if we in the civil rights movement had left it to elected officials to desegregate restaurants and lunch counters, to desegregate buses … I wonder how long we would have had to wait. And I think, truly, that we might still be waiting.”

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I was born there in 1978, less than a mile from the house where King grew up. As a schoolchild, I like others, visited Atlanta’s Auburn Avenue—the street where King was born, worked, died, and is honored. To see King’s neighborhood, and the home he was born in, humanized him for us children, letting us know that he was once young like us, wrestling with classes and playing with siblings. We went to the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, where King declared, “If you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice,” and to the headquarters of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the organization he led until his death in 1968. We visited the King Center built by his widow to spread King’s nonviolent doctrine, and saw the eternal flame that burns near his tomb and reminds us that his work endures.

My grandparents—native Floridians who first came to Atlanta as college students in the late 1930s—and my mother tried to shield my brother and me from the indignities they suffered during the era of Jim Crow. They did this mostly by trying to give us a better life; I seldom spoke to them about the racism they endured. But the living history was everywhere in Atlanta, and the frequency with which I saw King’s lieutenants and associates on television reminded me of both the progress we’d achieved and the work still left to be done. John Lewis, for example, was leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee when he was gassed and beaten badly on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, in 1965, during the start of a march to the state capitol that came to be known as “Bloody Sunday.” But he went on to represent Atlanta as a U.S. congressman and has fought for decades to preserve the Voting Rights Act he, King, and hundreds of foot soldiers helped usher into law.

Whack with John Lewis

When I became a journalist, I found myself gravitating toward telling the stories of black people, and focusing specifically on the legacy of the civil rights movement. As a college student, I got my first reporting job at the Atlanta Daily World, a black newspaper first published in 1928. The office was on Auburn Avenue—the same street I’d first visited as a child. I was working blocks away from where King worked.

By taking on civil rights as a beat in Atlanta, I not only had a front row seat to history, but the ability to ask those who lived it how they felt about current-day racial struggles. It was an extraordinary opportunity.

Even though I have left Atlanta, I carry all this history with me. This fall, almost a half-century after the enactment of the federal Civil Rights Act that King supported, I spent a few weeks in Ferguson, Missouri, as a reporter for Fusion covering the Michael Brown shooting and the ensuing protests.

From the day I arrived, the parallels between the Ferguson context and that of King’s struggles were everywhere.

Even though segregation is no longer legal and discussion of the civil rights movement has appeared in textbooks for decades, I still found neighborhoods in Ferguson so divided along color lines that I thought I had stepped into those black-and-white TV images of the 1960s I had seen. In the same way Bull Connor referred to King and other protesters as “outside agitators” in Birmingham, authorities and some residents in Ferguson referred to “outsiders” and the “negative influence of the media” on the African-American community—as if this community had no grounds to be unhappy of their own volition with the status quo before August 9, 2014. I talked to people on both sides of the racial divide who did not know each other’s daily lives.

The way the police deployed tear gas, dogs, smoke bombs, and riot gear certainly reminded me of stories I’d been told by people like Lewis. Images of clashing police and protesters in Ferguson—and the real-time reactions on social media—reminded me of the nation’s horror at the sight of water hoses, clubs, and snarling dogs 50 years before.

A rally in Ferguson, Missouri

The Ferguson rallies, both there and elsewhere in the country, were full of young people—much like those during the civil rights movement. But there were important differences, too. Unlike the masses who rallied around King in Alabama, there was no single leader of the protests I covered in Ferguson night after night. The shooting of Michael Brown had been the catalyst, but inequality—and specifically unequal treatment of black people in the criminal justice system—was the real subject, one with many stories to tell.

During the 1960s, the black church had a central role, serving as the moral foundation of the movement. In Ferguson, churches served as the site of several rallies and meetings, and preachers could regularly be seen keeping the peace on the front lines during protests. But the burgeoning movement was neither started nor maintained through the church.

And while the protesters on West Florissant Avenue were mostly peaceful demonstrators, there were some who would have disappointed King—looting, committing arson, firing guns.

There are some who think of the events in Ferguson as an isolated incident, simply a moment in time. But to me it seemed like part of the continuum in the struggle for progress in our country. When I interviewed King’s aides, they were always quick to mention that the civil rights movement didn’t die with King; it’s ongoing. While our nation has made racial progress, we still have far to go before we achieve full equality among America’s citizens. The reaction to what happened in Ferguson exposed that chasm anew.

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I was on such a mission one evening last year when I made the discovery of a lifetime. At a Goodwill store in downtown Phoenix, I spotted a stack of two dozen or so reel-to-reel tapes—not something you often see in a thrift shop—precariously balanced atop a rack of CDs and cassette tapes. Most of the tapes were labeled “Lincoln Ragsdale,” a name I did not recognize. But one box I picked up bore a faded paper tag that read, “Martin Luther King/Tempe, Arizona,” with a tape inside labeled with the year 1964. While I suspected the tape might contain a speech by the legendary civil rights leader, I knew it could be something as mundane as a home recording of a radio broadcast. Each tape was only $3, so I decided it was worth taking a chance on the box with King’s name on it and a few of the Ragsdale recordings. My purchase turned out to be a window into an era in Arizona’s history that I didn’t know much about.

Previously I’d considered myself reasonably familiar with the civil rights movement and King’s accomplishments. Because I was a young child during the 1960s, however, the period had little personal resonance for me. And, in any case, small-town Arizona seemed far removed from the broader social issues of the day.

I certainly had not been aware that King had any connection to Arizona, and an online search about his 1964 visit turned up only a nugget or two. The website for the Arizona State University archives did have a tantalizing photo of King on a stage with some dignitaries, so I sent an e-mail to Robert Spindler, ASU’s archivist, to see if he was aware of any recording of the civil rights leader’s speech in Tempe.

While I was waiting to hear back from him, I did some research on Lincoln Ragsdale, the name I had seen on the other tapes. It became clear that Ragsdale had been a hugely important public figure in his own right—a Tuskegee Airman, Phoenix businessman and early civil rights pioneer in Arizona. So I returned to Goodwill and purchased the rest of the tapes—about 30 in all.

Spindler wrote back saying he didn’t think a recording existed of King’s June 1964 appearance, which took place at ASU’s Goodwin Stadium. I told him I thought I had found one, and he invited me to bring it by, along with the Ragsdale tapes.

At his office, I handed him the box with the King label. He turned it over and over in his hands, then examined the tape inside. He was silent for a moment, then looked up and said, “Hmm. This looks right.” I leaned forward in anticipation. I saw Spindler’s professional reserve begin to fall away as he smiled. But he warned me not to get my hopes up. He said that old reel-to-reel tapes are fragile, and can easily disintegrate. He said the tape might be blank, or someone might have recorded over it. The only way to know for sure was to have it professionally digitized, and await the outcome.

Spindler also told me more about Lincoln Ragsdale. (He said that most of his in-depth information about Ragsdale came from Race Work, a study of civil rights in the urban west by ASU historian Matthew Whitaker.) Ragsdale was a mortuary owner who helped integrate the segregated Encanto District, which was Phoenix’s wealthiest neighborhood at the time. He helped integrate Phoenix schools and businesses, conducting sit-ins and other local protests. And he was instrumental in Arizona’s Martin Luther King holiday movement, which resulted in the first such holiday established by popular vote in 1992.

After a few months of agonized waiting, we got word that the King tape was intact and that digitizer had heard King’s voice. A small group of us, including Whitaker, another ASU professor named Keith Miller, and university librarian Sherrie Schmidt, met in a campus conference room to listen to the digitized recording for the first time. We sat in quiet suspense while Spindler started the audio.

It started with an introduction by ASU’s president, G. Homer Durham. Then the recognizable tones of Martin Luther King, Jr., filled the room. I got goose bumps.

Apologizing for his hoarseness (he said he had given more than a dozen speeches the preceding week), King spoke for nearly an hour. Some of his phrasings so closely matched previous speeches that Whitaker and Miller, who have studied King’s speeches for many years, were able to recite parts of it aloud with the track. King’s speech was wide-ranging, touching on his travels to India, the way racism had gotten subtler, and the need for people of color to take advantage of opportunities that were not open to previous generations. King talked about the way technology brought people together, both spatially and symbolically—which seemed appropriate given the way that we were suddenly catapulted back into his presence.

He made a reference to the Civil Rights Bill pending before Congress, rebuffing those who thought legislation would not help. “It may be true that the law cannot change the heart, but it can restrain the heartless,” he said.

King’s voice rose and strengthened as he affirmed his faith in America and its ability to solve the problem of racism. He concluded with the famous refrain, “Free at last, free at last—thank God Almighty, we’re free at last.”

As the tape ended, the room was silent. We could tell the recording was genuine. That introduction by ASU’s president helped to authenticate the speech’s location. And not only did the words and phrasing sound right to the ASU experts, but that melodic, urgent voice was unmistakable.

The fact that the King tape was found among those Ragsdale tapes also made sense. Spindler noted that Ragsdale was once vice president of the Maricopa County NAACP, and that it was the group’s invitation that brought King to Arizona. Ragsdale’s son, Lincoln, Jr., also told Spindler that he remembered once seeing the tapes at a vacation home in Flagstaff. Ragsdale’s daughter-in-law Jennifer Mabry Ragsdale, who contacted me after some initial news reports, was not surprised to hear that some of the huge amounts of archival material her father-in-law saved over the years ended up at Goodwill. The ultimate division of his estate had been contentious and chaotic, she said, with no clear record of what ended up where.

Listening to these recordings, I felt transported to another time and another reality, at once familiar and foreign. I couldn’t believe I had stumbled upon a treasure trove of Phoenix civil rights and religious history from the early 1960s and a recording of King’s first (and, as it turned out, only) public presentation in the state. The existence of the speech demonstrates his interest in Arizona, and the enthusiastic reception he received even though some people might think of Arizona as an intolerant place.

The discoveries and the subsequent conservation work by so many dedicated scholars drove home the importance of being a good custodian. Not only of artifacts, such as these tapes, but of our shared experience. It made me proud to learn that there were pioneers for African-American racial equality in our state, and that their heroic efforts were woven into the fabric of the national struggle. We need to make sure our descendants don’t forget this.

The Ragsdale recordings can be downloaded through the ASU Libraries site, and access to the King tape may be arranged through the library.

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Martin Luther King Jr., who can’t be accused of being selfish, once noted in a sermon that we all have a “drum-major instinct—a desire to be out front, a desire to lead the parade, a desire to be first.” It’s human nature to want recognition. Sometimes this selfishness is naked: I try to beat you so I can succeed. Sometimes it’s hidden: King noted that some people are always joining some social group or reform movement, ostensibly to help others in some way, but really because they can’t be comfortable being by themselves.

Almost two centuries ago, Ralph Waldo Emerson noted that the average American walked around with a new proposed Constitution in his pocket. Reformers were all over the place; they were convinced they could change the world. And yet, Emerson observed, they paid no attention to their own souls, to their own private unhappiness, to being better connected to the actual world around them as opposed to the abstract universes in their minds.

Emerson and King could never have imagined such human traits unleashed in today’s networked world of immediate and almost infinite interaction.

You can join as many groups as you like with the click of a button. You can help as many causes as your broadband will allow.

We post moment-to-moment thoughts on Twitter; we write daily posts on Facebook about activities that used to be summed up once a year, if at all, in holiday letters. (This year, Jimmy made the soccer team and scored three goals! Sally has improved her flute skills. Jack was promoted to executive vice president at his firm.) If words are difficult for you, you can pass along the daily moments in pictures on Instagram.

These are obviously self-centered activities, which is why teenagers (no offense, I was once one) love them especially.

But what about Batkid? And Twitter in the Arab Spring? And flash mob marriage proposals? These are good and unselfish acts, you might think.

They are, but even unselfish acts can be done selfishly, as King described. You feel the entire world ought to know you’ve proposed marriage. Your innermost thoughts need to be expounded to the universe. Our internal dialogue is outside, all the time.

Yet another great thinker, Blaise Pascal, once said that most problems in the world come from the inability to sit still in a room.

We’re lonely; we’re bored; and so we go looking for stimulation, and frequently enough, we get trouble.

We are more self-obsessed, but paradoxically, we let the entire world know about it. It’s another-centered self-obsession. We spend hours on Facebook and meet our friends less and less frequently in person.

In the 1950s, the writer H. L. Mencken, nearing the end of his life, bought a telephone. He couldn’t quite adjust to it. It bothered him that anyone could call his home at anytime and expect that he should stop whatever he was doing to speak on the phone. Mencken much preferred the world before telephones and television. You sat quietly in your home; if someone wanted to see you and they lived nearby, they came to your door and knocked. You wrote letters to those who lived farther away.

Nothing was instantaneous. You thought before you met or wrote or spoke.

The Internet is here to stay, of course. E-mails have certainly broadened our ability to communicate, especially at long distances, in a way letters never could. Mobile phones have expanded our ability to connect. And social media allows for group connections that go far beyond what used to be achievable by in-person group meetings.

But what we are losing is a sense of boundaries. No one is stopped by a door or even a telephone.

And so, the drum-major instinct takes over, and the wish to avoid knowing ourselves, and our real world, finds a new outlet. We flee reality more and more easily, by losing ourselves in a virtual world without limits.

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