Can the 'zeitgest' that made King famous happen again?

When Martin Luther King died 48 years ago, he left behind both a legacy and an empty throne.

The legacy is not disputed, but the seat at the head of the civil rights movement has never been filled to the level King held it, and the reason why is clouded. At least part of it is because King was shaped by the circumstances that he faced – the unusually charged and convulsive era of the 1960s, when the nation was on the cusp of boiling over – and that heady brew hasn’t erupted again to forge a new leader of that standing, observers say.

Recent years have come close, with riots filling the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, after Michael Brown, an 18-year-old black teen, was gunned down by a white officer in 2014. The shooting touched off a nationwide debate about police treatment in minority neighborhoods and invigorated the Black Lives Matter movement, which had started two years earlier following the shooting death of another black teenager, Trayvon Martin, by a neighborhood watch volunteer in Florida.

There are “glaring” similarities between the Black Lives Matter movement of today and the civil rights movement of the 1960s, said Rev. Donald Morton, associate pastor at Tabernacle Full Gospel Baptist Church in Wilmington.

Until now, he said, there had been no single issue around which people could unite. The civil rights movement has evolved over the decades since King was fighting for desegregation of the Deep South to emphasize a wide range of issues today.

But, “there was not a single, galvanizing issue,” Morton said.

Now, young people are uniting around police brutality and incarceration rates for minorities. In particular, he said, the treatment of young black men by the police is an issue that closely affects them so it has become a rallying cry.

That cry is being carried beyond just the people who are directly impacted and getting a place in the national debate, partly because of new technology, said Samuel Hoff, a political science professor at Delaware State University.

Delaware celebrates Martin Luther King Jr. Day

The now-ubiquitous smartphones that people carry record the public’s sometimes fraught interactions with the police, and the videos are then distributed through YouTube and social media.

That’s an echo of how the civil rights movement was fueled. Televisions had just started to become a standard part of the American home in the 1960s, and news programs broadcast footage showing peaceful marchers brutalized by firehoses and German shepherds.

For the first time, all of America could see what was happening in the South.

Now, America is able to see what is happening between police and the people who live in minority neighborhoods.

That’s the “2016 version of what TV did,” Hoff said.

Seeing a further – and more stark – similarity between the 1960s and today, Richard Smith, president of the Delaware NAACP, said, “When you’re talking about police shooting folks, there’s no difference between then and now.”

He did note the use of YouTube.

As for whether or not a new icon will come out of the Black Lives Matter movement, Hoff wasn’t sure. He used the German word “zeitgeist” to convey the precise set of circumstances that need to coincide in order to produce a leader like King – the person and the moment have to come together, he said.

“I hope that movement does not produce an iconic figure,” Morton said.

It makes the movement itself stronger if its spirit isn’t embodied in one man. It is stronger when there are many leaders all working toward the same cause, he said.

Pastor Silvester Beaman, president of the Interdenominational Ministers Action Council, made a similar point.

He said, “I think we make a mistake when we look for this individual to emerge and take us to the promised land.”

Has the dream become detoured?

Although King is remembered as the voice of the civil rights movement, there were many groups that were contributing to the chorus, he said, like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Urban League.

Given more time, King would have raised those other voices, Beaman said, predicting that “if that assassin’s bullet had not snuffed out his life, he would have knit together a fabric of leaders.”

But, King was killed at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968, and part of the movement’s momentum died with him.

In the now-vital Black Lives Matter movement, “leaders are formed because of it,” said Keith James, 20, who is a founder of the anti-violence group Voices for the Voiceless and a youth engagement assistant at United Way of Delaware. And there are many leaders, he said.

“Will somebody step out of it?” James asked. “I don’t know.”

Contact Saranac Hale Spencer at (302) 324-2909, sspencer@delawareonline.com or on Twitter @SSpencerTNJ.