shoulders but because both mastered the official language of American politics without losing touch with a popular religious tradition whose mixture of hope and fatalism was quite alien to liberalism. This made it possible for them to speak to ordinary people without condescension or false humility and to the learned without a self-important display of their own learning. Far more convincingly than most leaders, they could claim to speak for the whole nation, even though both spent their public lives in the defense of principles that proved enormously divisive.

Like Lincoln, King urged his followers to refuse any compromise with injustice but to combine militancy with moral forbearance and forgiveness. Having grown up under an intolerably oppressive system of race relations, he understood the equally dangerous temptations of acquiescence and revenge. When he first experienced the full impact of segregation, as a boy, he found himself "determined to hate every white person," and "this feeling continued to grow," he later said, even though his parents told him that he "should not hate the white man, but that it was [his] duty, as a Christian, to love him." The only way to overcome hatred of your enemy, however, was to stand up to him: such was the first principle of militant nonviolence, as King came to understand it as an adult. Black people had to overcome their deep feelings of inferiority, to confront their oppressors as equals, and to challenge segregation head on. They could no longer be content, like Daddy King, simply to stake out a subordinate position of relative security in a permanently segregated society. But they had to declare war on segregation—here was the second principle underlying King's position, even more difficult to grasp than the first, let alone put into practice—without appealing to their history of victimization in order to claim a position of moral superiority. That King should have come to see that racial hatred feeds off self-righteousness and acquiescence alike testified to his capacity for spiritual growth. What is even more remarkable is that he was able to implant this understanding in the

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