“If you will protest courageously, and yet with dignity and Christian love,” King promised his followers, “when the history books are written in future generations, the historians will have to pause and say, ‘There lived a great people—a black people—who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization.’” The historians have obliged: under King’s leadership, and by the courage of those who followed him, and those who’d paved the way for him, a commitment to civil rights became not only postwar liberalism’s core commitment but the nation’s creed.
