The poet Langston Hughes called Harlem the "Negro Capital of the World," and in the 1950s, when I was growing up there, it really was. The great northern migration of Southern blacks that began near the turn of the last century had made Harlem the largest African-American community in the country, and people still looked back with pride to the remarkable flowering of black arts and culture of the 1920s known as the Harlem Renaissance.

So I was somewhat nonplused by a recent report that African-Americans no longer constitute a majority in Harlem. According to the New York Times article, blacks now make up only four in 10 residents of Greater Harlem, which includes my old neighborhood, and the shift occurred at least a decade ago, although it went largely unnoticed. Harlem's current ethnic makeup reportedly is a mix of blacks, Hispanics and young white professionals who are rapidly transforming the character of the fabled urban enclave.

The article reminded me again of the legacy of Martin Luther King, whose birthday we celebrate Monday. So many of the ideals that inspired the civil rights struggle Mr. King led had their genesis in the writers and artists of the Harlem Renaissance that it's almost impossible to imagine the movement without them. Yet in hindsight, it's also clear that the gains Mr. King and his followers struggled so hard to achieve set in motion forces that would lead inexorably to just the kind of demographic change Harlem is experiencing today.

Start from the fact that, for all its storied history as a Mecca of black art, music and literature, Harlem's existence was conditioned on the rigid residential segregation that dominated nearly all American cities of the time. Blacks lived there because they had to, not because they wanted to. When the movement finally began to achieve successes in bringing down the restrictions that kept African-Americans confined to ghettos, many of those who could moved out.

Integration drained Harlem of much of its black middle class. And the riots, touched off by the fatal shooting of a black teenager by a white policeman in July 1964, marked the start of a long downward spiral that reached its nadir in the drug and homicide epidemics of the 1980s and '90s.

The riots were, in part, an expression of frustration over the slow pace of the change Mr. King and his movement had tried to win. But it took decades to repair the damage. Meanwhile, buildings were boarded up and the population continued to decline. People left Harlem, but no newcomers arrived to rebuild the community.

That didn't begin to change until the late 1990s, when former President Bill Clinton opened an office on Harlem's main drag at 125th Street near the old Apollo Theater. The arrival of Mr. Clinton, who so endeared himself to African-American voters that he was sometimes referred to as the first black president, seemed to help allay the fears of white urban pioneers and others, who began trickling into the area because of its relatively low housing costs and increased sense of safety.

The influx has accelerated since 2000, to the point where 1 in 10 Harlem residents today is white, and Hispanics make up nearly half the population.

How would Martin Luther King view this momentous transformation? Though some black residents have expressed alarm at the prospect of gentrification, I think he would embrace the re-emergence of an integrated Harlem community as a vindication of his movement's long struggle for equal opportunity and equal rights. A new generation of young black professionals and entrepreneurs who have the means to live anywhere in the city are joining the influx, drawn by Harlem's historic residential neighborhoods and cultural institutions.

The difference is that today they are going there because they want to, not because they have to, and inevitably they will leave their stamp on the neighborhood as indelibly as did their predecessors during the Harlem Renaissance. In that sense, Harlem will always be the capital of black America. But the America of which it is a part will also be a nation far more just and eager to celebrate its diversity than the one Mr. King and his courageous band of followers set out to change so many years ago.

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Glenn McNatt