“It makes his achievement all the more miraculous — winning a permanent stake in the system for a previously disenfranchised people, having begun with no political cards to play.”
“Miraculous”? I think not.
MLK was an eloquent and gifted speaker, serving more as a combustive agent for a societal process that was already well under way for generations. Those evolutionary changes were occuring at a deeper and more long lasting level than what could ever be manifested in such visible and celebrated single events as the “I have a dream” speech.
America was changing on its own and it didn’t take King, or the governmental intervention of the Civil Rights Act, to start Americans down the path we are now on......for better or worse.
I respectfully disagree — I was there. His speech was morally convicting for many Christians who were on the fence about Civil Rights. Many lower- and middle-class whites had huge stakes, since it would be their neighborhoods, churches, graveyards and many of their traditional job venues that would be integrated or overtaken by a different group of people with, at the time, the social habits associated with their former poverty and oppression. Many of those inner-city neighborhoods have never actually integrated, which was supposed to be the goal. Now, when whites go to see the churches where their parents and grandparents were married, they are regarded as oddities. Black people on the street say, "Can I help you? Are you lost?"