Sixteen years since its original commemoration as a national holiday, how many Americans remember that the Martin Luther King Day bill was signed into law by Ronald Reagan, the most reactionary and racially insensitive president of our time?

Yielding to public and congressional pressure in the mid-'80s, President Reagan -- whose famously symbolic visit to the Nazi cemetery at Bitburg, Germany endeared him to racists everywhere -- ironically became the reluctant advocate of our official celebration of Dr. King and his progressive legacy. This curious twist of history testified to the moral power and inevitability of King's humanistic vision of integration, tolerance and equality, however far humanity has yet to travel to reach those goals.

It's also interesting to note that most of the gains achieved over the last 40 odd years in the realm of civil rights and equal opportunity occurred during the administrations, and to some degree under the leadership, of three presidents from the South, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.

King's eventual opposition to the Vietnam War turned Johnson and other liberals against him -- a black man campaigning for integration was one thing, but at the time it seemed rather uppity for the Nobel Peace Prize recipient to be lecturing the white power structure on foreign policy -- and ultimately led to his murder.

Now, many of the people who resisted King's influence during his lifetime have embraced the King holiday as an opportunity to whitewash the image of a non-threatening black leader whose trademarks were nonviolence and some kind of harmless "dream." Safely enshrined as a historic statue, the reality of King's militancy, his inspirational leadership in labor struggles and the antiwar movement, his increasing acknowledgment of the connections between war abroad and poverty at home are easily ignored.

Yet King is such a contemporary figure--assassinated on April 4, 1968 at the age of 39--that many people remember firsthand what he was doing and saying, so the man's vision can be carried forward ... with the birthday commemoration serving as a reminder of what he actually was.

Spirit and Celebrity

Retired UCSC sociology professor Hardy Frye, who worked in the deep South in the 1960s as an organizer with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) -- often working in concert with Dr. King and his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) -- has called the King holiday an homage to "all the people who worked in the movement."

After he retired, Frye joined the Peace Corps and went to Africa. In a conversation held some time before he left, he remembered that the SNCC and the SCLC often differed over strategy or tactics, but that King was universally admired.

"He was the most decent person I've ever known," said Frye, adding that the man whom he and his fellow activists half-jokingly called "de Lord" was both completely approachable and somehow almost saintly: "You couldn't hear him speak without being electrified."

It was a combination of brilliant intellect, personal magnetism and oratorical eloquence -- integrated with a deep commitment to spiritual values -- that swept King into the leadership of a movement that mobilized thousands of people and made him a national hero. He skillfully used his own celebrity and the tactic of nonviolent confrontation to focus the attention of U.S. media on the struggle for civil rights.

King would often use the drama of a local crisis -- in Montgomery, in Selma, in Chicago, in Memphis -- to gain national publicity for his cause. SNCC had a different strategy, Frye said, whereby "you build a political organization at the grassroots level and you work your way out of a job by strengthening people to run their own communities. We didn't believe you bring NBC, ABC and all the cameras and churches in to push through national legislation.

"Not that we didn't think national legislation was important," he added, "but we were more in tune with people's daily lives than perhaps Martin was -- because of who he was and how much traveling he had to do."

Of course, it was in part the traveling, the expanding contact with different people in different communities that helped King understand the larger implications of black people's struggle for freedom, and to see that struggle in an international context. As early as 1963 King was referring in speeches to "our brothers and sisters in Africa and Asia who are moving swiftly toward independence, while we are moving slowly toward a hamburger and cup of coffee at a lunch counter."

Critiquing the Culture

The solid religious basis for King's activism prefigured what was to become known in Latin America as liberation theology. "God loves all his children," he said. "God is interested in the freedom of the whole human race." The power of nonviolence, he insisted, was in its ability to disarm the opponent from a position of moral strength, dignity, courage and compassion. It was a political extension of the revolutionary message of Jesus.

King's Christian critique of a supposedly Christian culture exposed the contradictions between America's ideals and its reality. As he drew the connections between racism, poverty, economic exploitation and militarism, his call for change grew more comprehensive. In the last year of his life he was saying that "a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."

Unable to ignore the implications of nuclear weapons, he observed that the choice was no longer "between violence and nonviolence, it is either nonviolence and non-existence."

These were fairly radical things to be saying in 1967 and '68--so radical, in fact, and so dangerous to the status quo that this visionary individual had to be crucified for his teachings. Whoever it was that ordered his murder, King's execution served to decapitate for the time being a growing movement throughout this country for social/spiritual/political transformation. Part of that transformation has occurred, as Frye pointed out, through the integration of numerous black activists of the King era "inside the margins of the system," where they have some impact as standard-bearers of a humane legislative agenda.

A subtler aspect of the transformation, so dramatically embodied in King as a person, has been the courage of individuals inspired by his example to change themselves and thereby change reality. Though there may be a long way to go before King's famous dream is realized, his birthday can serve as a beacon of commitment for those on the path of peace and liberation.

Stephen Kessler is a poet, essayist and translator who lives in Gualala, Calif.

Is it a conspiracy or just a coincidence that both Saul Bellow and Philip Roth have chosen for the protagonist of their latest novels an aging humanities scholar enamored of the ancient Greeks? Bellow's Abe Ravelstein, a philosophy professor famously modeled on the author's friend Allan Bloom, grounds his thinking in Plato and Aristotle; Roth's Coleman Silk, an African-American passing for Jewish who teaches classics, is devoted to Homer and the tragedians. Both men find in the works of these dead white males a combination of values, wisdom and insight into the human condition that transcends time and place.

The other thing these novels have in common is a first-person narrator who closely resembles the author and who functions in the story mainly as a witness. Bellow's Chick in Ravelstein is a moderately successful writer who has encouraged his friend to set down his educational ideas in a book that inexplicably becomes a bestseller and makes its author, Ravelstein, rich enough to afford the material luxuries he likes to lavish on himself. Chick holds Ravelstein in awe as a kind of mentor--even though Ravelstein is the younger man--and is urged by the vain and bombastic Ravelstein (who, as it happens, is dying of AIDS) to write a memoir of him when he's gone.

Roth's familiar Nathan Zuckerman in The Human Stain is, like his creator, a well-known novelist who jealously guards his privacy yet whose life and work are disrupted by Silk, who entreats him to write the story of the disgraced professor's downfall after being unjustly accused of racism. Where Chick is a rather passive character, claiming merely to record "piecemeal" the larger-than-life antics of his pal Ravelstein, Zuckerman the irrepressible novelist is drawn so deeply into Silk's story that he becomes an investigator who imaginatively reconstructs events he could not have witnessed. Roth makes it clear to the reader that his book is fiction, which gives him license to excavate the imaginary facts in search of deeper truths.

By contrast, it's unclear whether the author of Ravelstein is fully aware of the unreliability of his own narrator. Chick/Bellow so adores and admires Ravelstein/Bloom that his affectionate account reveals not only a brilliant teacher and colorful individual but an obnoxious, slovenly, intellectually arrogant, cruel, overbearing, egomaniacal blowhard. More ironic still, as argued persuasively by Louis Menand in the New York Review, the real subject of Bellow's book may not be Bloom at all but the author's most recent former wife, a gorgeous Romanian mathematician portrayed here as a high-powered physicist named Vela, against whom he takes literary revenge with a scathingly nasty if superficial portrait.

Following that line of speculation I would go further to suggest that the wry equanimity of tone that pervades his prose is a reflection of Bellow's contentment with his fifth and latest wife--named Rosamund in Ravelstein--a bright but blandly angelic young woman less than half his age who, in the novel as in life, is devoted to taking care of him in his twilight years. It's as if Bellow, having survived into his mid-80s with his stylistic and intellectual gifts intact, can't quite believe how lucky he is to be living his final chapters in such sweet company.

Roth on the other hand, at 67 a generation younger than Bellow, shows no sign of mellowing with age. If anything, his fierce engagement with the issues of our time, and of all time--freedom, identity, justice, betrayal, hypocrisy, integrity, family--is more intense than ever in The Human Stain. The creator of the comic masterpiece Portnoy's Complaint has in recent years taken that manic energy and turned it toward the darker reaches of contemporary history for the sake of exploring, in maximalist terms, profoundly vexing questions: What is the nature of the human soul? Why must the good suffer? How do the most intelligent people still manage to deceive themselves? How does history inevitably invade and change our supposedly private lives? Roth's vision may be tragic, but the passion, anger, exasperation, wit and curiosity that fuel his sentences make this latest book, like the five that preceded it in the 1990s, yet another invigorating and consciousness-shaking performance.

In a recent interview, Roth cited Bellow's great 1954 novel The Adventures of Augie March as one of his early inspirational examples of "verbal freedom, imaginative freedom," a liberating model of the individual voice that every writer aspires to. In The Human Stain, the theme of freedom, of creative individuality, also occupies a central place: Coleman Silk, a physically and intellectually gifted light-skinned black man, decides, like so many Americans before him in fact and fiction, to reinvent himself. Having ruthlessly rejected his own mother, Silk sets out on the Nietzschean/Emersonian path to become what he is, and succeeds, only to be brought down, some 50 years on, by "the stranglehold of history that is one's own time." Like the ruined king in Oedipus at Colonus, Silk's dignity and heroism reside (as Zuckerman imagines it) in the consciousness of his conduct amid "the terrifyingly provisional nature of everything" that conspires to destroy him. Roth offers no catharsis, no resolution, no "closure," only a pained awareness of ambiguity and grief.

By inventing rather than accepting a received identity, Silk takes on a lifelong secret that is a private burden, but a burden that empowers him to move freely in a society otherwise closed to most individuals of his "group." In unraveling Silk's story, Zuckerman/Roth reveals the slipperiness of fixed notions of identity and at the same time explores not only Silk's secret but the shadowy zones in the souls of his other main characters as well--especially Coleman's much younger lover, Faunia Farley, a supposedly illiterate, much-abused, long-suffering, hard-luck, tough-minded woman who, despite her dreadful life, forcefully rejects the role of victim.

In the probing portrayal of Faunia we see the dramatic difference between Roth's and Bellow's respective interest in women: where Bellow is content to describe from a bemused distance his female characters in Ravelstein, Roth in The Human Stain attempts to enter the minds of his--even the unsympathetic academic villain, Delphine Roux--and examine the workings of their psyches from their own point of view. Faunia is a complex and compelling character with a power and wholeness one might not expect from an external description of her situation. Roth brings her alive in all her contradictory subjectivity.

The human stain is itself a resonant metaphor, first cited by Faunia in reference to a tamed crow. It alludes to the taint that people leave on everything they touch, and to the indelible marks of identity we bear despite our every effort to erase them, and to the imperfections of our messy lives that may have their roots in the biblical curse of the knowledge of good and evil, and finally to the incriminating spots on Monica Lewinsky's dress, "the smoking come" of a president whose human weakness and public persecution provide the atmospheric backdrop for the terrible tale of Coleman Silk.

As in his previous novel, I Married a Communist, Roth is indicting the moral corruption of a social order that, in its hypocritical piety, demands the ritual sacrifice of anyone who won't abide the tyranny of mass thought. He resists all ideology, struggling instead with human unknowableness--another kind of stain--the enduring mystery of who we are and what makes us act as we do. Roth is no optimist and is therefore long-shot Nobel Prize material: his work unsettles more than it uplifts. But like Bellow, who won that honor in 1976 and is the acknowledged dean of American letters, Roth is a monster among fiction writers who may in time cast an even longer shadow.