What if King had lived?

ASSOCIATED PRESS The preacher in him would have continued speaking out against injustice, war and maybe even pop culture. He likely would not have run for president. He probably would have endured more harassment from J. Edgar Hoover.

Four decades after Martin Luther King fell to an assassin’s bullet, colleagues and biographers offer many answers to the question: What if he had lived?

For his children, however, the speculation is more personal. They know their lives would have turned out differently had they had their beloved father to guide and teach them.

Instead, history moves on, remaking the world in myriad ways. The nation has grappled with issues of race and inequity without the benefit of King’s evolving wisdom. A generation has come of age celebrating him in a national holiday, like other figures of the frozen past.

But given the trajectory of his life — from his appearance on the national scene during the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott of 1955 to his death on a second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn., on April 4, 1968 — some of those closest to him have a good idea what King might be doing now, and where the country might be.

In the months before his death, King was speaking out against the growing U.S. involvement in Vietnam and was working with other civil rights leaders on a “Poor People’s Campaign,” with a march on Washington scheduled for that May. He was in Memphis that spring day to support striking sanitation workers.

Were King alive today, the disciple of Mahatma Gandhi most certainly would be speaking out against the Iraq war, said King biographer David J. Garrow. However, citing the famous “Drum Major Instinct” sermon King delivered from the pulpit of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta just two months before his death, Mr. Garrow said people might be surprised to hear echoes of presidential candidate Barack Obama’s controversial former pastor.

“God didn’t call America to engage in a senseless, unjust war,” King said of the fighting in Vietnam. “And we are criminals in that war. We’ve committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world, and I’m going to continue to say it.”

Although King didn’t go as far as the Rev. Jeremiah Wright by saying that God “damn America,” he predicted the Almighty might punish this country for “our pride and our arrogance.”

“And if you don’t stop your reckless course,” he imagined the deity admonishing, “I’ll rise up and break the backbone of your power.”

Mr. Garrow and others feel comfortable saying King would not have sought elective office.

In 1967, King was being courted by the “New Left” to make a third-party run for president on an anti-war ticket with the renowned pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock. FBI wiretaps reveal that King gave serious thought to running, but ultimately decided his role lay outside the political arena.

The Rev. Joseph Lowery, who co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with King and marched alongside him, doesn’t think time would have changed his friend’s mind.

“I think Martin was a preacher, and I doubt very much if he would have wanted to subject himself to the need to compromise and play certain games that are requisite to political candidacy,” he said. “I think he would have preferred to do what he did best, and that was point out to all candidates and all officials, … ’Thus sayeth the Lord.’ ”

Had he chosen that path, his enemies — chief among them Mr. Hoover, the FBI director — would have laid bare potentially embarrassing details of King’s personal life.

U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy authorized the wiretapping of King’s home and offices in a campaign to ferret out communists. The secret recording campaign failed to prove King was a communist, but it did provide evidence of the civil rights leader’s extramarital affairs.

William C. Sullivan, head of domestic intelligence under Mr. Hoover, told a congressional committee that King was subjected to the same tactics used against Soviet agents and “no holds were barred.”

Mr. Hoover’s office was unable to marginalize King with his supporters or cow him into silence with threats of exposure. But how might King have fared in the Internet age, when every peccadillo is exposed and every word parsed in a 24-hour news cycle?

Hosea Williams, one of King’s chief lieutenants, once told Martin Luther King III that his father was “unstoppable” because he had conquered the two things that made men most vulnerable: the fear of death and the love of wealth.

Some, however, think King’s influence was on the wane and that at the time of his death he had reached the zenith of his public career. He had “run out of things to do,” Chauncey Eskridge, a King attorney, had told Mr. Garrow.

“The painful truth is that in his last two months or so before he was killed, King was so exhausted — emotionally, spiritually, physically — that a lot of the people closest … to him were really worried about his survival, his survival in the sense of would he have some sort of breakdown,” Mr. Garrow said. “It would be expecting something truly superhuman, literally superhuman, for King to have continued the pace of life he had lived over those 12 years for another 12 years, never mind for another 20 or 40 years.”

Journalist, author and commentator Juan Williams wonders whether King would be able to connect in a meaningful way with the youths of today.

Although he was just 39, the 1964 Nobel Peace laureate’s insistence on nonviolence was conflicting with the burgeoning black power movement, said Mr. Williams, author of “Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America — and What We Can Do About It.”

“The big issue would be whether or not when he spoke out against the excesses of the rappers, for example, or when he spoke out on the high number of children born out of wedlock, whether or not he would be lumped in with the Bill Cosbys of the world,” Mr. Williams said.

But he has no doubt King would be a force on the international stage.

“I don’t think he’d be in the petty fray in the way that we think of some of these civil rights guys who are kind of ambulance chasers,” Mr. Williams said. Instead, he sees an elder King as a man of “some standing, some stature, that people wait to hear from him. … I think of Nelson Mandela in this way.”

• AP writers Woody Baird and Jason Bronis contributed to this report.