Martin Luther King is one of the most remarkable leaders of any civilization and of any century. The American Black community was split in the 1960s. It could have gone two ways. Groups like the Black Panthers and people like Malcolm X were stridently preaching violence. Martin Luther King was preaching social change by peaceful means.

King showed that peaceful means can, indeed, achieve the goals of liberation and of social progress. When King was preaching peace, Black were excluded from middle class and upper class jobs. By 1990, the Black community had evolved an entirely new social tier--BUPPIES--Black Urban Professionals, Black Upwardly Mobile People. These were folks with a college education, with high-paying jobs, with expensive homes, and without the Southern accents that had distinguished blacks in their ghetto days.

In the early 1960s, Black-and-white mixed marriages had been taboo or frowned on, depending on your community. Today they are everyday occurrences. In the early 1960s Blacks were kept in ghettoes by red-lining--the refusal of banks to provide loans to blacks who wanted to buy homes outside of the Black district of a city. Today middle and upper-middle class communities like mine in Park Slope Brooklyn are thoroughly mixed. And suburbs are no longer whites-only.

The walls to progress and to opportunity have come down dramatically. The disturbing thing is that the legacy of Malcolm X still remains. The Black community is still split. And no matter what you're told about Malcolm X's move to peaceful change after his pilgrimage to Mecca, remember this. Street vendors in black shopping districts do not sell posters of Malcolm X holding a bird of peace aloft in his left hand. They sell posters of Malcolm holding an automatic assault rifle high above his head, calling for a military charge, calling for blood and violence.

Let's hope the example Martin Luther King has left us continues to win in death as it won in life--creating social change without bullets, battle, and the sort of change the riots of the 1960s produced--burned-out shops, burned-out streets, and burned-out neighborhoods--social desolation.

*Howard Bloom was a social activist in the days of Martin Luther King and beyond. He worked against red-lining in Buffalo, New York, his hometown, at the age of fifteen. In the 1970s and 1980s he worked to break down racial barriers in the music industry. He fought on behalf of the right to reach a colorblind audience for artists like Prince, Michael Jackson, Bob Marley, Chaka Khan, Lionel Richie, Earth Wind & Fire, Run DMC, and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. He was instrumental in getting Black music into two key preserves of all-white entertainment—MTV and FM radio. Bloom also worked extensively with the NAACP and its president, Benjamin Hooks, with the United Negro College Fund, and with the National Black United Fund.

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