Tuesday, April 4, 2023, will mark the 55th anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., one of the great civil rights leaders of American history, whose official federal holiday we observed on Monday, Jan. 16.
King had gone to Memphis, Tenn., to support a sanitation workers’ strike when he was shot and killed on a balcony outside his room at the Lorraine Motel.
The Lorraine Civil Rights Museum Foundation purchased the hotel in 1988, built the National Civil Rights Museum adjacent to it and transformed the hotel into a memorial.
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 own death in 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 devotion to 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 made America a more diverse, more integrated and more tolerant nation. King was a leader, but not the only one. Hundreds of local leaders in the South marched and protested against segregation and discrimination, participating in an organized movement toward a singular goal. Protests need direction and guidance, otherwise they are sound and fury signifying nothing.
Like any man or woman, King was flawed. Pundits, philosophers, historians, modern-day activists and political scientists still debate his motivations and his interactions with his contemporaries. We have no idea what he would make of our world today in spite of all of these conjectures. He was a creature of his time, like all of us, but a figure of drive, clarity and eloquence who found himself at the center of a movement and took full advantage of his position to better America. He helped end Jim Crow laws and racial segregation in the Deep South and called for a degree of equality across racial, ethnic and religious lines that we still struggle with achieving today.
The crux of King’s civil rights movement was the need for each of us to treat outsiders whose ancestors spoke a different language, or who had a different skin tone, or who prayed in a different way, in they same way that 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 united not by language, faith or national origin, but by ideals enumerated in our Constitution. We are part of a grand experiment to which King referred: “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 our conversations, our homes and our hearts remain open to 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 the proposition that all men are created equal.
When the Constitution’s preamble proclaims that the document was called into being “in order to form a more perfect union …,” that phrasing is 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 farther along that long path. But King envisioned the 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
