ON MARTIN Luther King Day, celebrations and sanitizations of King's life bombard Americans with a wealth of iconic images - from Montgomery and Birmingham to Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge and the Washington Mall. This year, history mixes with politics; our remembrances of King dovetail with Barack Obama's quest for the presidency.
To mention the two men in the same breath can seem uncomfortable. Placing their careers on the same plane invites no small measure of cognitive - and historical - dissonance. Yet on at least one key point, their parallel paths remain locked together.
King's ability to persuade white Americans was an essential part of his genius. Obama has staked his presidential bid on this same skill. One need gaze no further than the Iowa cornfields to understand that Obama's campaign is about much more than African-Americans.
The very existence of a national holiday in King's honor speaks volumes about his interracial influence. King not only condemned white southerners' viciousness; he also offered forgiveness. He provided a way out, a path toward release. He promised that direct action protest could win black equality, just as "it will purify, cleanse, and heal the sickness in white society," historian August Meier wrote in 1965. "King first arouses the guilt feelings of whites and then relieves them," providing "an extraordinary catharsis for the white listener."
Precisely because King held out hope for whites, he touched and moved millions. His oratory, couched as it was in Christian pieties and constitutional ideals, prodded whites to tolerate the unfolding black struggle - and even to free themselves from racism. "The end is redemption and reconciliation," King wrote in 1958.
While Obama seeks the highest political office in the land, King sought the liberation of a people. To win whites over, Obama employs a King-like language that reaches beyond racial divisions. Yet where King dotted his speeches with images of black suffering, Obama drops hints and preaches hope. Some whites respond to these calls out of a genuine desire to embrace racial equality; others wish to soothe guilt and salve consciences; many contain some conflicted combination of the two.
Massachusetts voters, who elected Edward Brooke to the US Senate 40 years before Deval Patrick's gubernatorial victory, are uniquely acquainted with such appeals. African-American journalist Carl Rowan was notably skeptical of Brooke's 1966 triumph. "Being able to vote for an articulate Negro is the cheapest kind of conscience-clearer. Electing Brooke is a much easier way to wipe out guilt feelings about race than letting a Negro family into the neighborhood or shaking up a Jim Crow school setup."
If King sought to abolish such "Jim Crow setups," Obama makes his run in a post-civil rights - yet still woefully uneven - America. As the Democratic contest shifts to states where black and Latino voters wield considerable clout, new problems could bubble to the surface. Whether Obama addresses issues such as African-American poverty, chasms between cities and suburbs, and the resegregation of schools may become a central question - and whether he can tackle such dilemmas while retaining white support would be another. King, in his heyday, occasionally achieved this balancing act.
Especially by the later 1960s, King gained millions more white detractors when he denounced economic inequality and the Vietnam War. In a time of black power, whites feared and expected violence - and dismissed rebellious blacks as the "savages" of centuries-old stereotypes. But whites had particular trouble with the threat that King posed. He spoke of democracy, Christianity, and revolution without blood. He defied every category of white racial myth, from the uppity black to the submissive Sambo.
Hillary Clinton recently offered a childhood recollection, as one "transfixed and transformed" by King as he "had burst through the stereotypes and the caricatures." This ability to transcend categories lay at the heart of King's interracial appeal.
At his most politic moments, King could offer himself as everything to everybody. King inspired blacks to wage an epic crusade, rising up and over the vestiges of slavery. Yet he also convinced whites that this challenge was not threatening - and that it held promise for them, too. Obama's best hope for the presidency exists in his attempt to square similar circles.
Jason Sokol is author of "There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights." He teaches African-American history at Cornell.
