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"I think that is the way Dr. King would have approached it," he says. "King's heart was to look at the broader picture. The small picture is to be angry. The broader, more prophetic picture is to devote yourself to changing the system and changing minds. That was King's great work: He brought the race issue to the table and put it on the minds of the American people. It was not on our agenda before that. But he came along and told us that we're all created in God's image, and that we ought to start looking at each other as brothers and sisters, especially those of us in the Christian church."

Three decades after the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., the race issue is still very much on our minds. Across the nation the news is regularly filled with stories of racial tension and economic disparity between blacks and whites. Divided attitudes on political issues like affirmative action and welfare reform signal abiding strains between the races. A recent Gallup poll found that, by a margin of 76 percent to 49 percent, more whites than blacks believe blacks have equal opportunities for jobs, education, and housing. It also revealed that blacks are twice as likely as whites to favor affirmative action.

Faced with persistent "wake-up calls," the nation is recognizing the widening gulf. President Clinton's Initiative on Race has sought to get the issues "on the table" but has seen only lackluster results so far. Meanwhile, names such as Rodney King and O. J. Simpson have become symbols for America's racial dilemmas.

Despite our national lack of momentum, Martin Luther King's name has entered the national lexicon, evoking idealistic notions of integration, unity, and brotherhood—or, as King used to say, "the beloved community." King's memory stands as a reminder of how far we have journeyed as well as a disturbing beacon of the great distance left to travel.

For the church, King's legacy is as multifarious as the nation he sought to reconcile. While some revere him as a hero and a prophet of peace, others look on him with disdain, a fact that has been magnified by revelations of King's sexual improprieties and lapses in ethical judgment. Nonetheless, the enduring importance of King's life and achievements have led many evangelicals who once dismissed him as a liberal rabble-rouser now to acknowledge the spiritual validity of his social mission.

VOLATILE DAYS
Robert Graetz was in a tight spot for a white preacher in Montgomery, Alabama. It was 1955, and the Montgomery bus boycott—an unprecedented effort mounted by the Negro community to protest the city's segregated bus system—was in its embryonic stages. The Negroes of Montgomery had long endured the oppression of Jim Crow segregation with relatively few complaints. But with the quiet and unexpected revolt of Rosa Parks, a seamstress who had been arrested when she refused to give up her seat to a white man ("My feet were tired," she later said), the Negro community found itself inspired to take a stand.

As the pastor of the all-Negro Trinity Lutheran Church, Graetz could either remain silent and preserve his privileges as a white man, or forfeit his family's peace and safety by identifying himself with his Negro congregation. Graetz, a lanky, sandy-haired Caucasian, chose to remain faithful to his Negro flock and became the only white publicly active in the boycott. Graetz, now a 69-year-old interim pastor in central Ohio, explains it: "My family and I had to get involved. If we had remained aloof, our effectiveness as spiritual leaders in the black community would have disintegrated."

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March 2 1998, Vol. 42, No. 3