It is an accepted axiom that the reason the civil rights movement and the African-American community have never produced another leader like the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. is that there has never been another person like Martin Luther King him - unsullied in motivation, unparalleled in oratory, unchallenged in leadership.

In the 34 years since his martyr's death in Memphis, King has been granted the power of pure moral authority - if he said it, it was right; if he asked for it, it was done. How could any of his contemporaries - Ralph David Abernathy, Roger Wilkins or Jesse Jackson - expect to fill such shoes?

Of course they couldn't, but that wasn't just because of King's greatness; it was in large part because those were not the shoes King was wearing, particularly near the end of his life. King's accomplishments were monumental, but some argue that the legendary status he attained in death made it impossible for any African-American leader ever to live up to that ideal, while others contend that turning King into a beatific icon robs him of the strength of his humanity that was so crucial to his success.

For starters, the civil rights movement that King led to revolutionary victories in the mid-1960s was not as unified as it was depicted. By the time of King's assassination in 1968 it was fracturing into often-bickering components. The issues of war and poverty that King and others were beginning to confront did not come with the same moral clarity - or widespread support - as the fight against Jim Crow.

"In April 1968, King was not the leader of the civil rights movement," says Melinda Chateauvert, undergraduate studies director in the Afro-American Studies Program at the University of Maryland, College Park. "His credibility and standing in the civil rights community had seriously deteriorated. ... By embracing the anti-war movement, he caused many in the civil rights movement to disavow his statements."

John Dittmer, a professor of history at DePauw University in Indiana, notes that most narratives of King's life seen at this time of year - his birthday is celebrated as a national holiday tomorrow - follow the civil rights movement from the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott of 1954 to the march from Selma, Ala., in 1965 and then skip to his death in 1968 without chronicling the splintering of the movement in King's last years.

"Things go off in a lot of different directions after 1965 and King had much less control that he did before," says Dittmer.

If King had been alive to celebrate his 74th birthday last Wednesday, few think he would have the same legendary status that his legacy has today - exactly what many say about John F. and Robert F. Kennedy. That is not to minimize in any way what this Nobel Peace Prize winner accomplished; it is to say that he accomplished so much, so quickly, that there is no way he could have done more so fast. Dittmer quotes African-American intellectual Vincent Harding: "Martin Luther King made all the history he could."

King biographer Taylor Branch says that despite King's commitment to nonviolence, the kindly, saintly image that has become his aura since his death is not appropriate. "He never had the status we put on him of being someone that most people were comfortable with. ... He was a fighter. He was scary."

This legendary status, Branch argues, does damage to King's reality. "It tames him by concealing the degree to which his challenge hit people in the gut and still would today."

Few find it surprising that no one has come along to take his place. "You have to remember that it wasn't Martin Luther King who created the civil rights movement, it was the civil rights movement that created Martin Luther King," Dittmer says. "I think the reason we haven't produced another leader is because we haven't produced another movement."

Branch says, "I don't think the conditions have been right for another King figure, someone black or white to set forward a new democratizing agenda of that breadth."

Branch, who is working on the third volume of his King trilogy, points out that when King died, the people in the movement were leaderless and exhausted.

"One of the great things about King was that he was comfortable with a wide array of big egos in his circle fighting to influence him. As soon as he wasn't there anymore, it basically imploded," Branch said. "Plus, they were tired. These guys were essentially in a war. They had been going to jail for decades. Even the relatively new ones like Jesse Jackson were somewhat tired and disoriented."

Ronald Walters, a sociologist at the University of Maryland, College Park, says that Jackson "came as close as anybody could have to being King's successor," but could not compete with the King legend.

"The legacy and mythology we have given him he only obtained in the aftermath" of his assassination, Walters says. "Nobody could measure up to that."

At the height of his power, King was focusing on the South, where the legal aspects of the race issue were clear - and where the majority of the country could back his campaign without fear of it affecting their own community. When his movement came north - and when it branched into opposition to the war in Vietnam and the Poor Peoples' March - King's support fractured.

Within the movement, many who backed King's civil rights goals were openly questioning his tactics. Stokely Carmichael and his black power supporters were sarcastically calling King "De Lawd" on the 1965 march from Selma, Ala. They drew more support in the ensuing years. The message of already-martyred Malcolm X ridiculing nonviolence was also attracting followers.

Chateauvert argues that at the time of King's death, those at the grass-roots level of the movement were developing a distrust of even having national leaders. "People were cautious because even then they were aware of the way President Johnson and other white leaders had tried to manipulate their spokesmen and leaders. ... They were more interested in teaching people to have the power to determine their own lives."

By 1968, a lot of different issues were attracting the attention of those who backed - and led - the civil rights movement.

"It wasn't just the anti-war movement, there was black nationalism, Black Muslims, the Black Panthers, the women's movement, the [gay rights] Stonewall movement, Keep Clean for Gene [presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy], Resurrection City, Robert Kennedy's run for president, prison rights, Cesar Chavez, the environmental movement - the list goes on and on," Chateauvert says. "That's my reason for why nobody emerged to take his place, lots of people emerged."

Complicating the picture were the riots that followed King's assassination in many cities, including Baltimore. Coming after riots in New York and Los Angeles and preceding similar outbreaks, they cut into the popular support King's nonviolence attracted and accelerated the loss of support for the civil rights movement.

"In the post-civil rights era, with the emergence of the conservative movement that was essentially a backlash to the gains of the civil rights movement," says Walters, "politicians were arrayed against African-American leadership, particularly against black civil rights leaders," making it difficult for leadership to emerge.

Branch says in some ways the success of the conservative backlash is not surprising. "They might have gotten the better of the argument by saying, 'Look, we're absorbing this enormous amount of change. The last thing we need is more change.'"

Even King, Branch contends, did not fully comprehend the power of the forces he set in motion, forces the country is still coming to grips with. "They did everything from putting pro sports teams into the South to putting black players on basketball teams - where amazingly enough they weren't - to turning every school from Exeter to the University of Virginia coed."

Focused as he was on the legal and economic condition of black people, King did not "realize the extent to which the equality movement was seeping through into gender," Branch says. "Even his closest aides admit he was a [male] chauvinist, but this [women's movement] came from the same power he let loose, so he was beginning to adapt to it like everybody else."

As the rest of the country began to adapt to all these changes - a time that was not ripe for the appearance of another King-like leader calling for more change - Branch sees King's influence emerging more overseas, in the Cold War protests of Eastern Europe, in the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, in the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in China, and now in Myanmar.

"King would be applauding that because in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, in his opposition to the Vietnam war, basically he was trying to get America to apply nonviolence to advance democracy around the world as well as at home," Branch says.

Freeman A. Hrabowski III, a native of Birmingham who as a teen-ager went to jail in a King-sponsored march, says the scrutiny that those in the public eye now encounter means we may never have the kind of heroic leadership seen in King's era.

"The mindset of people is different today," says Hrabowski, president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. "Even among whites you don't see the same type of heroes. Americans tended to make these perfect myths of people, talking about them as if they had no flaws. But with the emphasis on media exposure, we know too much about people for that today."

Hrabowski notes that many of those who abandoned King's methods in the late '60s later changed their minds.

"As time has gone on, many of those young people who were becoming more militant came back to an approach that was focused more on nonviolence, on using the laws of the land and a rational approach to making change," he says.

What happened, Hrabowski says, was that they realized that King was the one who had the greatest impact.

"He showed the country through education someone could change the thinking and attitudes of millions of people," he says. "This country is a very different place than it was 30 or 40 years ago because of what King did. We have an appreciation of our differences, we respect our differences and we understand that different types of people bring different strengths to the table."