By Msgr. Noel C. Burtenshaw

He's an engineer now. And his family is grown. He lives in Southwest Atlanta in a middle-to-upper-class black neighborhood. His life is good and he -- let's call him Bill -- and his wife have few complaints.

But Bill remembers the South of the forties and fifties. He remembers growing up in the pre-King days.

"It was bad," remembers Bill. "It wasn't slavery, it wasn't the cotton fields. But it was bad. You would meet the cop on the street or some other nasty white guy and he'd call you 'boy.' 'Hey boy' he'd say and you would want to scratch his sneering eyes out. In your gut, you would want that awful condescension to stop and you knew it was never, ever going to stop. The frustration was so bad."

"It was bad to have to sit on those busses in the back seats. It was a problem to go downtown, even to the stores. What if you needed to go to the bathroom? You could not use just any convenience."

"I loved the movies and yet I hated them. Why did my people, why did I, have to make that climb to the balcony? Once I went to a Georgia Tech game. We were herded into a fenced-off part of the stadium like cattle. I never went back. It was like South Africa."

"I remember going for my driver's license. There were two entrances, one marked 'white' and the other 'colored'. The sight of those entrances and so many like them in this city lit fuses of fury and pain in me."

"I hated them each and every one. Then along came Dr. King and led Americans of all colors to demand an end to the injustice. The bus boycott on Montgomery was the beginning and I remember thinking it is more than just a beginning. It is the beginning of the end."

And so it was for Bill and his black brothers and sisters. The voting rights legislation, the public accommodation legislation, school desegregation all destroyed an old order, dripping with corruption and bitterness. A new day downed.

"But the new day was not easy," says Bill. "Resentments were rampant. Whites resented the change and we resented our history of segregation and terror. Often down the years we have faced each other -- unyielding. Both sides have had to learn many things and mostly learn to compromise."

"I look back and see that at one time, few professional positions were open to blacks. In some cases, after the King era, ONLY blacks could obtain many of those same positions. Accusations were hurled back and forth. The efficiency of black workers was questioned. Reverse discrimination was a phrase often used. These were tense times, and there are still tense situations."

"But, I want to make this point," says Bill. "Until now the march to freedom persevered. The difficult path to acceptance proceeded, uphill perhaps, but in an optimistic way. This Reagan thing wants to destroy all that. I can't believe it after all our pain, our suffering to make it work, this man takes it apart."

Bill was agonizing over the Reagan administration's decision to reverse an 11-year policy of the federal government to deny tax-exempt status to private schools practicing racial discrimination.

"It's not these right wing religions," says Bill. "They will fade from sight. But Dr. King gave his young life to rid us of senseless injustice, we struggle for years to put it together, we are beginning to see some results and Reagan comes along and says we must go and do it all over again. It's not just racist, it's the height of stupidity."

"And, Lord knows, as we celebrate the birthday of Dr. King, this insensitive policy is an insult to his memory. However, let it be, maybe blacks are losing the spirit he gave us. It might be time to renew the march."

All the terms used by Bill recall the pressure-packed days of the sixties. They were days of marches and speeches and optimistic new eras. They were days of battles won peaceably, for the most part, on the streets. They were days of real revolution that, hopefully, will never have to be lived again.

However, let no one be fooled, the spirit of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. -- "We shall overcome" -- lives on.