Justice, love and hope. Racism, poverty and war. The first describes the man, Martin Luther King, Jr. and his goals; the second describes the issues of his time. From November 1955, until his death on 4 April 1968, King was a significant player on the public stage. During these years, we know him principally as a civil rights leader and antiwar activist. However, he was much more. Indeed, now that there is a federal holiday symbolizing what he stood for, what he believed, and the goals he sought, there is the danger of forgetting that he was a man subject to the shortcomings of any man. That his agenda of realizing the Beloved Community, where people are evaluated in terms of the content of their characters rather than the color of their skins, is only partially realized and in real danger of being reversed. Not only has the United States become more conservative and less humane in the years since his death, it is in the process of redefining and repositioning itself in keeping with the demands of a new century. This new positioning, in my opinion, will further distance it from a sensitive and conscious attention to its domestic needs resulting in a more oppressive and less democratic society than was the case before especially now that terrorism is a topic of everyday conversation and the subject of harsher and more stringent policies from the legislative arena. Thus, the focus of this course is directed toward understanding the man, his times and the work he was about altering the balance of power in US society to better realize the founding concepts of “America" Freedom, Liberty, Equality, and Justice and their import for our times before he was brutally assassinated while lending moral support to a garbage collector's strike in Memphis, Tennessee.
