Wednesday, April 4, marks the 50th anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. — one of the great civil rights leaders of American history.
King had gone to Memphis, Tenn., in 1968 to support a sanitation workers’ strike, when he was shot and killed on a balcony outside his hotel room at the Lorraine Motel, which was later purchased and transformed into the National Civil Rights Museum.
King had been threatened for years due to his activism. A bomb threat had delayed his flight to Memphis on March 29. With that bomb in mind, he prophesied his death at his final speech on April 3:
“We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And he’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. So I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”
King began his journey into the American consciousness as a preacher in Montgomery, Ala. Like any community-minded leader, he began by working to better the conditions of his flock and his city, until his cause for equal treatment under the law and in the eyes of his God compelled him to work on a larger scale. After leading the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, King became a national figure. As a leader of the civil rights movement, he lent his personal and political weight to causes that has made America a more diverse, integrated and tolerant nation.
Like any man or woman, King was flawed with foibles that define us as mortals. That aside, he helped end Jim Crow laws and racial segregation in the Deep South and called for equality across racial, ethnic and religious lines that we still struggle with today.
The crux of King’s civil rights movement is to treat outsiders whose ancestors spoke a different language, who have a different hue of skin or who pray in a different way they same way we would treat our friends, family and next-door neighbors.
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” King said at the 1963 March on Washington.
As Americans, we have become one people, unique in the world in that we are not united by language nor by faith nor by national origin but by ideals enumerated in our Constitution. We are part of a grand experiment that King reiterated: “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed — we hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal.”
As long as the conversation, our homes and our hearts remain open to these strangers who want to become Americans, we can one day fulfill that ideal, set forth by our Founding Fathers when they declared our freedom to build a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to proposition of equality.
When the Constitution’s preamble states “… in order to form a more perfect union …,” is it not a declarative statement by dead men, but a directive to future generations, to us here and now and to our descendants long after we are gone.
The civil rights movement was merely one step closer on that long path, but King envisioned that arrival of that perfect union: “When we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city,” King said, “We will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing … ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.’”
Christopher Fox Graham
Managing Editor
