Columnist Hal Rothman: Bemoaning the remaining void left by the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King

Hal Rothman

Sunday, Jan. 15, 2006 | 8:11 a.m.

Hal Rothman is a professor of History at UNLV. His column appears Sunday.

There has never been another American leader like the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. No individual has ever generated a revolution of such great proportion in so many ways.

No one else ever possessed the moral vision and the incredible personal strength and grace that led him to command the stage long enough to upend almost 200 years of legalized racial discrimination in the United States.

On the evening of April 4, 1968, I was a 10-year-old, doing my homework and listening to the radio in my room when "shots rang out in a Memphis sky," as the rock group U2 later sang.

I wept as I heard the news. Even as a child, I could feel the power of the man's words, the clarity of his vision and the compassion in his voice as he spoke. Here was a leader, a man that a nation could be proud of.

King's rise to prominence was serendipitous. In 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Ala., he was a 26-year-old pastor at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. When the community rallied, more experienced leaders assumed that this protest, like all the earlier ones, would fail.

They did not want to be associated with it, so they pushed the new kid on the block, the one who was not tied to any camp in the African-American community, forward. They expected him to fail. Little did they know that they had catapulted a great leader into the American pageant.

What made King special was the way in which he maintained composure in all circumstances and made what opponents saw as his victories into triumphs for humanity. When the Montgomery bus strike succeeded, he cautioned his followers not to see it as a victory for African-Americans alone -- "don't make it that small," he said at the very moment of triumph -- but as one for all Americans.

That clarity and the moral suasion of nonviolence spoke volumes in the tumultuous 1960s. King brilliantly relied upon the power of faith and shamed white America into opening the way to African-Americans. When faced with the powerful oratory of King or the Neanderthal sheriff Eugene "Bull" Connor of Birmingham, Ala., and his dogs and fire hoses, how could anyone choose otherwise?

Las Vegas in the 1960s was hardly a racially enlightened place. Even though the hotels had been legally integrated after 1960, African-American life in Las Vegas remained segregated. In the small town that our city was then, most African-Americans lived in West Las Vegas, a historically black segregated area that had once been the McWilliams townsite.

In his brilliantly dystopic and terrifying novel, "The Cold Six Thousand," James Ellroy paints a picture of that community that is so corrupt and bleak, so beset by the mob and the white world, that it defies imagination.

Ellroy may take literary license, but the reality was not much better. In 1968, West Las Vegas still faced de facto segregation in its schools, the streets were still not paved, and the only jobs available were at the Nevada Test Site or back-of-the-house in the hotels.

We have made tremendous progress since then, but we can't take too much credit for it. In 2000, Las Vegas was the most integrated black-white city in the nation, but not as a result of any genuine virtue on our part.

Instead, integration here occurred because of the growth of the city and the in-migration of an African-American middle class. Even though racial boundaries have fallen in almost every dimension of the American society, King's dream of a society where people are judged by the content of their character has not yet come about.

Even more, the future is no longer in black and white. It's black, white and brown, the result of the phenomenal growth of the Latino population, not only in Las Vegas, but also in the nation as a whole.

Somehow, I don't think that Dr. King would have minded. Although a champion of African-American rights, by the end of his too-short life he had cast his eyes on a greater triumph, the fundamental equality of all humanity.

Vision of that size and scale is in short supply today, as the nature of our politics and culture makes our eyes small. We see only the little things today, a prospect that would make Dr. King sad. In the end, despite it all, he believed in the goodness of humanity.