How Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination changed America 50 years ago and still affects us today
By Peniel E. Joseph January 15 at 7:05 AM
The assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis on April 4, 1968, continues to reverberate throughout the nation in large and small ways almost 50 years later. In many ways our nation is still trying to recover from King’s death and the opportunities for racial equality, economic justice, and peace — what King referred to as a “beloved community”— that seemed to recede in its aftermath.
Fifty years after King’s assassination, struggles for racial equality appear as acute now as they did then, except the juxtapositions between signs of racial progress and the reality of continued racial injustice are even more stark. The “post-racial” symbolism in the election of Barack Obama as the nation’s first black president existed uneasily alongside the harsh reality of mass incarceration of black and brown men and women, boys and girls. Just as 1968 ushered in the last of the long hot summers that began in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963, the deaths of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray triggered urban rebellions in Ferguson, Mo., and Baltimore that recalled the fits of racial unrest that gripped the nation 50 years ago.
King proved to be more than just the civil rights movement’s most important national political mobilizer. Over the course of a dozen tumultuous years, King helped to reimagine America’s collective moral and political imagination, successfully arguing in “Letter from Birmingham Jail” in April 1963 that racial justice comprised one of the fundamental principles of American democracy. He amplified this argument four months later at the March on Washington in a speech whose more radical impulses were quickly overshadowed by an extemporaneous detailing of the “dream” he envisioned for the American nation-state.
By 1968 King’s dreams grew more boldly combative, spurred by a growing realization that America required more than political reforms that confronted democracy’s jagged edges. Armed with a Nobel Peace Prize and an international reputation as a human rights activist, King forcefully — if belatedly, according to some critics — denounced the Vietnam War on April 4, 1967, one year to the day of his assassination.
In the year before his death, King joined with Black Power activist Stokely Carmichael in denouncing the Vietnam War, broke with his friend President Lyndon B. Johnson and began an anti-poverty crusade that linked race, class and gender struggles in creative ways. Near the end of his life the preacher listened more intently to fellow activists than ever, forging alliances with welfare rights activists, farmworkers, Native Americans and poor whites in an effort to fundamentally transform American democracy.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2018/01/15/kings-assassination-shaped-americas-identity-50-years-ago-and-continues-to-shape-it-today
