By Gerard E. Sherry

Atlanta, GA -- Martin Luther King, Jr., great grandson of a slave, realized part of his American dream here when the citizens of the new South honored him at a civic banquet celebrating his receipt of the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize.

Crowning the evening activities (Jan.27), the sellout audience of 1,500 Negroes and whites joined hands to sing the anthem of the civil rights cause, “We Shall Overcome.”

Nothing like it had been seen anywhere else in the Deep South -- religious and civic leaders honoring a Negro citizen who has done more than anyone else to break the pattern of a segregated society and arouse the conscience of the white power structure.

To be sure, the accolades were not unanimous. While the City of Atlanta was represented in the person of Mayor Ivan Allen, Jr., no one but the audience represented the State of Georgia. Though the city of Atlanta presented Dr. King with a handsome scrolled citation, the state government ignored the proceedings.

Absent too, were many leaders of the business community -- even though among the ranks were men and women who had done much to make Atlanta a southern showcase of racial harmony. They were said to expressing a protest against Dr. King’s appearance on the picket line during a recent strike at the Scripto Company Plant. However, three top officials of Scripto, including James Carmichael, chairman of the Board did attend the banquet.

Also missing were the leaders of white Protestant churches in the city to whom Dr. King made a special appeal for friendship and cooperation.

In mitigation of their absence, however, the secretariat of the Georgia Council of Churches were one of those who made public tribute to Dr. King at the banquet. The four major sponsors of the civic event were Archbishop Paul J. Hallinan of Atlanta, Rabbi Jacob Rothschild of the Atlanta Temple, Ralph McGill, publisher of the Atlanta Constitution, and Dr. Benjamin L. Mayes, president of Morehouse College.

Dr. King set the tone of the evening in asserting that his native southland was “challenged to rise from the sins of dark yesterday to the positive achievements of a bright tomorrow.”

“A significant role in this transition,” he said, “is assigned to the people of good will of the white South. Unfortunately in the past the leadership of the white South has by and large been in the hands of close-minded extremists.”

However, Dr. King expressed confidence that the extremists “do not speak for the South. They speak only for a willful and vocal minority.”

“There are in the white South millions of people of good will whose voices are yet unheard, whose course is yet unclear and whose courageous acts are yet unseen. These persons are often silent because of fear -- fear of social, political and economic reprisals.”

“In the name of God, in the interest of human dignity, and for the cause of democracy, these millions are called upon to grid their courage, to speak out, to offer leadership that is needed,” he said. If people of good will of the white South fail to act now, Dr. King warned, history will record that the greatest crime of this era was “not the vitriolic words and the violent action of the bad people, but the appalling silence and indifference of the good people.”

“Our generation will have to repent not only for the words and acts of the children of darkness but also for the fears and apathy of the children of light,” he said.

Perhaps the greatest applause for Dr. King came when he made an impassioned plea to the white South to stand up for justice.

“I make a plea to the white churches to remove the yoke of segregation form its own body,” he said. “Unfortunately most of the major denominations still practice segregation in local churches, hospitals, schools, and other church institutions. It is appalling that the most segregated hour of Christian America is 11 o’clock on Sunday morning -- the same hour many are standing to sing ‘In Christ There Is No East Or West.’”

“Equally appalling is the fact that the most segregated school of the week is the Sunday school. It will be one of the tragedies of history if a future Gibbon is able to say that, at the height of the 20th century, the church proved to be one of the greatest bulwarks of segregated power.”

Dr. King reemphasized his belief in nonviolence as “the most potent protest weapon available to oppressed people” in their struggle for freedom and justice.

“The method of nonviolent resistance is effective in that it has a way of disarming the opponent, it exposes his morale, and at the same time it works on his conscience it also makes it possible for the individual to struggle to secure moral ends through moral means,” he said.

“This is where nonviolence breaks with communism and any other method which contends that the end justifies the means,” Dr. King said. “In a real sense, the means represent the ideal in the making and the end in process. So in the long run destructive means cannot bring about a constructive end because the end is preexistent in the means.”

The civil rights leader called a nonviolent resistance “a creative force through which men can channelize their discontent.”

“It does not require that they abandon their discontent,” he noted. “Discontent is sound and healthy. Nonviolence saves it from degenerating into morbid bitterness and hatred. Hate is always tragic. It is as injurious to the hater as it is to the hated. It distorts the personality and scars the soul.”

“Psychiatrists are telling us now that many of the inner conflicts and strange things that happen to the subconscious are rooted in hate. So they are now saying ‘love or perish.’ This is the beauty of nonviolence; it says you can struggle without hating; you can fight without violence.”

“It is my great hope,” Dr. King said, “that as the Negro plunges deeper in the quest for freedom, he will plunge even deeper into the philosophy of nonviolence. As a race we must work unrelentingly for first class citizenship, but we must never use second class methods to gain it.”

“We must never succumb to the temptation of using violence in the struggle, for if this happens unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness, and our chief legacy to the future will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos.”

Dr. King concluded with a moving passage in which he observed that he had reached perhaps the mountain or achievement in his activity with receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize but he said, “I must return to the valley.”

“A valley filled with misguided, blood thirsty mobs,” he said, “but a valley filled at the same time with little Negro boys and girls who grow up with ominous clouds of inferiority formed in their little mental skies. A valley filled with millions of people who because of economic deprivation and social isolation have lost hope and see life as a long and desolate corridor with no exit sign.”

“I must return to the valley -- a valley filled with literally thousands of Negroes in Alabama and Mississippi who are brutalized, intimidated and sometimes killed when they seek to register and vote. I must return to the valley all over the South and in the big cities of the North -- a valley filled with millions of our white and Negro brothers who are smothering in an air tight case of poverty in the midst of an affluent society.”