King Moves North

Things being relatively quiet in the South, Martin Luther King marched in the North.

In a speech before the New York City bar association, King strongly suggested that civil rights groups have a right to defy law--if only because "they had no part in making" so many laws that affect Negroes. What the U.S. needs, King said, is a "divine discontent." He spoke of his own "maladjustment" to segregation, religious bigotry, the "madness of militarism" and "the self-defeating effects of physical violence," half-jokingly urged the formation of an "International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment."

Test Ban. In Boston, where King had gone to lead a march protesting Boston Negroes' discontent with housing, jobs and schools, he paid a call on Massachusetts' Republican Governor John A. Volpe. King reminded Volpe that he had lived in Boston for four years while attending Boston University: "Boston is one of the cities I consider a part of my home." Afterward, King toured Boston's slummy Roxbury section, home of most of the city's 64,000 Negroes. Said he to one group: "Some of the same things wrong with Alabama are wrong with Boston, Massachusetts."

Later, at a press conference, King softened his criticism a bit: "Let me assure you that we are not here to say Boston is the worst city in the United States. I think there are some good things in Boston. I think there are many, many people in this community who have come to terms with their consciences on racial injustice." But, he added, "I think it would be unfortunate for any community to sit down in the wayside and feel there's nothing to do." He also allowed as how he didn't mind having fellow civil rights leaders speak out against the U.S.'s try-to-win policy in Viet Nam, spoke up against, of all things, nuclear bomb testing--an issue that, if he had read a newspaper since the test ban treaty was signed on Aug. 5, 1963, he should have known to be passe. Said King: "One cannot be just concerned with civil rights. What good does it do me to integrate a lunch counter if the milk I drink there is loaded with strontium 90?"

Testing Ground. That afternoon King appeared before the Massachusetts legislature and said: "For one who has been banished from the seats of government and jailed so many times for attempting to petition legislatures and councils. I can assure you this is a momentous occasion." He had, he said, "come to Massachusetts not to condemn but to encourage. It is from these shores that a new nation, conceived in liberty, was born, and it must be from these halls that liberty must be preserved." He attacked as a "myth" the argument that race-relations problems cannot be solved with legislation. "Well, it may be true that you cannot legislate integration," he said, "but you can legislate desegregation. It may be true that you cannot legislate morality, but behavior can be regulated. It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can restrain him from lynching me, and I think that is pretty important also." The legislature applauded long and wildly.

The next day, which had been decreed as "Martin Luther King Day" by Governor Volpe, King showed up more than an hour late for the march's start. Finally the marchers, including Mrs. Malcolm Peabody, mother of former Democratic Governor Endicott Peabody and herself a veteran of last year's St. Augustine, Fla. civil rights demonstrations, stepped off from Roxbury's Carter Playground. By the time they reached Boston Common, they numbered some 18,000. Despite a drenching rain, King spoke for 40 minutes, said: "The vision of a new Boston must extend into the heart of Roxbury and into the mind of every child now being stifled in segregated schools. Boston must become a testing ground for the ideals of freedom, and so I come to Boston on behalf of the future of America, on behalf of those frustrated people, black and white, to whom Jesus referred as 'the least of these my brethren.' "

He would, he said, be back this summer to lead demonstrations in several Northern cities, including New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit and Baltimore.

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