Today marks the observation of the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. A day that honors the memory of the late civil rights champion and recipient of a Nobel Prize for peace.

Looking back at a time in the bloody and frantic 1960s, who would have believed then that in four decades this nation would have risen from the ashes and changed so much for the better -- but it has! Thanks to the courage and tenacity of one lonely man, the impossible dream turned into reality.

In his message of nonviolence, Dr. King made all things possible. This nation never looked back on the old ways because of one man.

Today, the Democratic Party preparing for the presidential election in November has two frontrunners, one a woman, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton from New York, and one a black man, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, born of a Kenyan father and a mother from Kansas. Both candidates in a large way are beneficiaries of the gospel of a man who never gave up his dream.

The Republican Party seems to be leaning toward Sen. John McCain of Arizona, and if anyone has paid his dues it's McCain, who survived years in a North Vietnam prisoner of war camp, never giving up his love for his native land.

So let the game of electing a president begin in the land of the truly free.

As one gets older the mindset changes and deepens and now I can truly say, "Why not a woman?" "Why not a black?" "Why not a Jewish president?" You see, I believe that Sen. Joe Lieberman, an Independent from Connecticut ,has more common sense, wisdom and guts then the rest of the entire Senate and House combined, but what do I know?

Forty years ago and all the long years before that, the U.S. was a different nation. My dad would take his youngest son to Dexter Park in Queens, New York, to see the mighty semi-pro Bushwicks beat other all-white semi-pro teams in doubleheaders Sunday after Sunday. Then one Sunday, the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro National League arrived and dad and I, who always rooted for the underdogs against the Bushwicks, suddenly were in "seventh heaven."

The Kansas City Monarchs easily swept the Bushwicks, winning both games, and on our trolley car ride home a 6- or 7-year-old kid got his first lesson in what prejudice was all about when I asked dad if any of those Monarchs were good enough to play in the "Big Leagues?"

Dad's eyes were sad, as I recall, as he said to his son, "Many of those Monarchs are good enough to play in the Big Leagues, but negroes are not allowed in." He hesitated then said, "It's not right, but that's the way it is."

That's the way it was and always had been.

Years later, long after dad died, a young preacher man named Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. came onto the scene in the 1950s and '60s, and gathered millions of believers in his campaigns for equal rights for blacks through a program of nonviolence. Whether his efforts would have changed the old ways while he lived we'll never know -- but what we do know is that his assassination in 1968 changed the course of American history.

The year 1968 was the darkest we'd ever experience. By Jan. 5 the U.S. death toll in Vietnam reached 16,000, and it would more than triple before the horror came to an end years later.

By Feb. 8, a former Attorney General and by then a U.S. senator from New York, Robert Kennedy, sharply attacked his own Democratic party's policy in Vietnam in the wake of the Tet offensive. On March 16, Kennedy announced his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination. (Robert Kennedy would be assassinated in Los Angeles on June 6, 1968.)

On March 31, in a televised broadcast, Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson ended a speech on the Vietnam situation with the stunning news that he would not seek or accept another term in office -- an election he knew he could not win.

Then on April 4, 1968, another bombshell fell. While in Memphis, Tenn., to support a strike by black sanitation workers, Dr. King was murdered by an assassin's bullet. All over the nation King's nonviolence agenda was taken over by black militants shouting "Burn, baby, burn!"

President Johnson caught in a "squeeze play" finally signed the Civil Rights Act bill on April 10, just six days after Dr. King died, but the gesture was too little and too late.

What followed in those desperate days tore asunder what Dr. King had fought for and died for, as murder, civil insurrection, looting and arson swept across the land from coast to coast.

I was a New York Police Department sergeant in those days, and was assigned to riot duty with thousands of other bosses and officers to quell the "Burn, baby, burn" mobs in the tough Brownsville and East New York sections of Brooklyn. Hundreds of arrests only put a dent in the anger we faced up close and real on those Brooklyn streets.

I've never forgotten the nine days of hatred and mayhem that set race relations back years in the "Borough of Churches," and the 12-hour tours that took their toll on all of us.

But on that ninth day, an Easter Sunday, suddenly all was calm. No mobs, no gunfire, no looting and no arson and we wondered, what happened?

Good people dressed in their Easter best were going to church along quiet streets. Two ladies in their 50s dressed to the nines and wearing Easter bonnets did not look away as they passed me, but smiled a "Happy Easter, sergeant." I returned the greeting and wondered if Dr. King had something to do with the peace that so suddenly arrived.

When I think back to the 1960s I always recall the haunting song, "Blowin' In The Wind." Two lines in that song tell it all and they go:

"How may times can a man turn his head

And pretend that he just doesn't see?"

We did turn our heads away for too many years -- but by some miracle, Dr. King made us turn and see at last.

(Ev Parker can be reached at evjenpar@mailbug.com or 224-9956.)