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In 1964, Dr Martin Luther King Jr predicted that within 25 years, the United States would probably elect its first black president. He was optimistic, in the wake of the gains of the civil rights movement, that the country was progressing. Four years later, he was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee on 4 April, 1968. At the time of his death, he could not have predicted that a draft-avoiding, woman-chasing, publicity-addicted real estate developer with a documented history of discrimination against African Americans would one day rise to power.

Even before King's death, however, a white backlash against the victories of the civil rights movement had begun. King himself had become unpopular among many whites who viewed the way he linked the Vietnam War to poverty and racism as an unacceptable transgression. Yet, real change was happening. More African Americans were being elected to political office. College attendance was rising among young blacks. Home purchases were increasing. And, according to surveys of the times, more whites were tolerant of racial integration.

It is therefore a surprise to some that 50 years after King's death, the black community has stagnated and even reversed in many areas. As economist Valerie Wilson notes, "Race far too often remains a deciding factor in the economic status of African Americans" in many areas of life. Black unemployment, from the late 1960s to the present, continues to be about twice that of whites even when controlling for education attainment. The Economic Policy Institute notes the black median household income in 2016 was 61 per cent that of whites. This is 2 per cent lower than the 63 per cent in 1968. The EPI also notes that black poverty is 2.5 times higher than white poverty, only slightly lower than in 1968. In addition, while high-profile police killings of African Americans remain a serious issue, the entire criminal justice system, particularly disproportionate incarceration rates, has deeply harmed the black community.

Another dispiriting sign of the times is the rise of racist organisations. According to the Southern Poverty Law Centre, there are more than 600 white supremacist groups in the United States, a number that has grown since Trump announced his candidacy in 2015. The alt-right had its mainstream ambitions facilitated by one of its biggest boosters, Steve Bannon, becoming a top adviser to the president.

Trump's justice department has supported voter suppression, withdrawn consent decrees that sought to end racist police abuse, has fallen back on civil rights enforcement, and in countless other ways turned back the clock.

What accounts for this reversal of fortune is a multitude of issues that cannot easily or quickly be addressed. First, the political environment has shifted dramatically to the right since the 1980s. Ronald Reagan dog-whistled his way into the White House. With a wink and a nod, Reagan advocated "states' rights", an end to welfare cheats, a crackdown on street criminals, and pushing back on the civil rights agenda. Subsequent presidents - Republican and Democrat - came with an agenda of welfare reform and punitive crime bills. Anti-liberal policies were only partially mitigated by liberal black elected officials and grassroots activism.

Unsurprisingly, the election of Obama was met with jubilation in the black community but seen as a final nail in the coffin of white privilege by many whites. The birth of the Tea Party movement, with a distinct racial edge (despite protestations to the contrary), as well as the birther movement, demonstrated that post-racial talk was just that. Obama's timidity when it came to political battles and his hesitation to employ a racial critique regarding policy contributed to the stall.

All of this, however, was just the opening act. As seething anger grew in white pockets around the nation, it became clear that dog whistles were not enough to capture the raw fear and panic that the Republicans had sowed for decades. The nation's number-one birther peddler parlayed that racist trope into a victorious presidential run. Trump did not create the atmosphere of racial resentment; it created him.

And now, in a time when political coherence and nous is needed the most, the black community is organisationally, ideologically, and politically ill prepared for the current backlash. The existing civil rights community is not so much wrong in its demands as much as it lacks the daring and verve the moment calls for. The Black Lives Matter movement was a much needed political jolt during the Obama era. It correctly argued that ending police harassment and the killings of African Americans would require a radical public policy agenda - a position the administration was hesitant to take. But the movement's demands also went beyond policing issues and called for a sweeping public policy programme that addressed everything from access to education, to better housing opportunities, and employment equity. These are the right polices - it just needs a more assertive, electorally engaged, cross-generational, community-based black leadership to see it through. There's a lot to be learnt from MLK himself.
Professor Clarence Lusane is chair of the political science department at Howard University
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From MLK to Trump: Only a radical public policy agenda can defeat racism in the US

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In 1964, Dr Martin Luther King Jr predicted that within 25 years, the United States would probably elect its first black president. He was optimistic, in the wake of the gains of the civil rights movement, that the country was progressing. Four years later, he was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee on 4 April, 1968.

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Today, it's not clear that any shooting could be awful enough to embolden Congress to thwart the National Rifle Association. But even back then, the N.R.A. throttled much of what Mr. Johnson intended to do.

"The voices that blocked these safeguards were not the voices of an aroused nation," an angry president said at the bill signing. "They were the voices of a powerful lobby, a gun lobby, that has prevailed for the moment in an election year."

He called on "those of us who are really concerned about crime" to fight for stronger laws. "We have been through a great deal of anguish these last few months and these last few years - too much anguish to forget so quickly."

The new law outlawed gun sales to felons, drug abusers, minors and those with mental illness; banned most out-of-state and mail-order gun sales; and sharply curbed imported weapons, including the cheap, tiny pistols used in many homicides.

It remains a cornerstone of federal gun law today.

The King assassination spurred the legislation not just because it horrified the nation, but also because it prompted unrest across the country, including in Washington, where lawmakers watched rioters come within blocks of the White House as thousands of federal troops were mobilized.

"It was in Congress's backyard, so they didn't have to read about it in the newspapers. They could see it," said Larry Temple, a high-ranking aide and special counsel to Mr. Johnson. "The death of Dr. King and the resulting riots in Washington had an impact on Congress and what they wound up doing."

But it wasn't until June 5, when Senator Kennedy was assassinated, that the logjam looked like it would break. A day later, a modest gun-control proposal that had languished passed Congress, raising the age to buy handguns to 21.

Still, Mr. Johnson wanted something far more sweeping. He proposed to treat guns like cars: They would be registered and their owners would be licensed.

Had something like this passed, gun-control proponents say, the United States today might look more like Britain or Australia, countries where guns are tracked and gun violence is a fraction of what it is here.

"He said, 'We have about 10 days or two weeks to get it passed,'" recalled Joseph Califano, his chief domestic adviser. "'If we don't get it out of committee by then, the N.R.A. will kill us.'"

This time, there has been no similar urgency in Washington, even as hundreds of thousands of protesters in the capital and elsewhere have demanded changes after the killing of 17 students and staff at a high school in Parkland, Fla.

Crime is less a concern, as the murder rate has fallen sharply since the sixties. But mass shootings have become frighteningly common. Anyone - or anyone's child - could be a victim, at a school, a concert, a church, a movie theater or a nightclub.

And while a smaller percent of households own guns, the country has more of them, and they are deadlier: Semiautomatic rifles like the AR-15 have become the weapon of choice in the largest recent mass killings, leading to death tolls in the dozens.

Most people today favor tighter gun restrictions, polls indicate, just as they did a half-century ago. But the N.R.A. also wields political power disproportionate to the size of its membership, as it did then.

In 1968, the organization was not yet as uncompromising as it is today. But it used tactics that would feel familiar now.

It flooded its members with sky-is-falling warnings about the government taking away gun rights, and urged them to hound lawmakers. In a letter to 900,000 N.R.A. members in June 1968, the organization's president, Harold W. Glassen, said that the "right of sportsmen" to lawfully own and use firearms was "in the greatest jeopardy in the history of our country."

Frustrated gun-control backers called it "calculated hysteria and distortion." But it was profoundly effective.

In its coverage that month, The New York Times called the gun lobby among the most effective in Washington, citing the association's ability to get "sportsmen, farmers and gun lovers to put pressure on their congressmen."

Soon, Mr. Johnson's favored provisions were shorn from the bill by his old cadre of fellow Southern Democrats.

"Strom Thurmond is hostile as hell, and so is Jim," - James O. Eastland, Democrat of Mississippi - "and they're mutilating the bill as it is," the leader of the Senate Republicans, Everett Dirksen of Illinois, told Mr. Johnson in a recorded phone call on July 24, 1968 that is in the Mr. Johnson's presidential library. (Senator Thurmond was by then a Republican.)

The licensing and registration provisions passed neither chamber, and triumphant pro-gun forces announced it was now legislation they could "live with."

To which Representative Charles S. Joelson, Democrat of New Jersey, responded: "I suggest that tens of thousands of Americans can die with it."

The Gun Control Act was signed into law that fall.

Two years later, the N.R.A. helped defeat the re-election bid of a leading Senate proponent of tough gun laws, Joseph D. Tydings, Democrat of Maryland, a man who had won his seat just six years earlier in a landslide.

By now the N.R.A. has perfected the art of going after lawmakers who defy the organization. That is one reason the demands of mass shooting survivors and their allies, now led most visibly by the Parkland students, remain so far apart from the measures Congress is considering.

In 1956, after his house was bombed, Dr. King applied to the local sheriff for a permit to carry a concealed handgun. He was denied on the grounds that he was "unsuitable," according to Adam Winkler, the author of "Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America."

Friends and relatives who feared for his safety urged him to hire a bodyguard and armed watchmen, he wrote in his autobiography. But soon, he and Coretta Scott King, his wife, reconsidered and gave up the one gun they owned. "How could I serve as one of the leaders of a nonviolent movement and at the same time use weapons of violence for my personal protection?" he wrote.

Fifty years ago, the death of great leaders prodded Congress to act on gun control. Now, at a similar juncture, it is the death of schoolchildren that has stirred the makings of a movement. It remains uncertain whether the current movement for gun restrictions will result in meaningful reform.

So far, the main impetus is in state legislatures. "Even in Republican-controlled states it appears there is at least some openness to doing something, building on the foundation laid over the last five years in less conservative states," said Adam Skaggs, chief counsel of the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. But he said Congress may not do much unless midterm elections shake things up.

For Dr. King, who would have turned 89 in January, getting rid of his gun helped him reckon with his mortality and focus on his movement.

"From that point on, I no longer needed a gun nor have I been afraid," he wrote. "Had we become distracted by the question of my safety we would have lost the moral offensive and sunk to the level of our oppressors."

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gunfight: the battle over the right to bear arms in america (book)

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How M.L.K.'s Death Helped Lead to the Cornerstone of Gun Control in the U.S.

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Today, it's not clear that any shooting could be awful enough to embolden Congress to thwart the National Rifle Association. But even back then, the N.R.A. throttled much of what Mr. Johnson intended to do. "The voices that blocked these safeguards were not the voices of an aroused nation," an angry president said at the bill signing.

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To many millions of American Negroes, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was the prophet of their crusade for racial equality. He was their voice of anguish, their eloquence in humiliation, their battle cry for human dignity. He forged for them the weapons of nonviolence that withstood and blunted the ferocity of segregation.

And to many millions of American whites, he was one of a group of Negroes who preserved the bridge of communication between races when racial warfare threatened the United States in the nineteen-sixties, as Negroes sought the full emancipation pledged to them a century before by Abraham Lincoln.

To the world Dr. King had the stature that accrued to a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, a man with access to the White House and the Vatican; a veritable hero in the African states that were just emerging from colonialism.

Between Extremes

In his dedication to non-violence, Dr. King was caught between white and Negro extremists as racial tensions erupted into arson, gunfire and looting in many of the nation's cities during the summer of 1967.

Militant Negroes, with the cry of, "burn, baby burn," argued that only by violence and segregation could the Negro attain self-respect, dignity and real equality in the United States.

Floyd B. McKissick, when director of the Congress of Racial Equality, declared in August of that year that it was a "foolish assumption to try to sell nonviolence to the ghettos."

And white extremists, not bothering to make distinctions between degrees of Negro militancy, looked upon Dr. King as one of their chief enemies.

At times in recent months, efforts by Dr. King to utilize nonviolent methods exploded into violence.

Violence in Memphis

Last week, when he led a protest march through downtown Memphis, Tenn., in support of the city's striking sanitation workers, a group of Negro youths suddenly began breaking store windows and looting, and one Negro was shot to death.

Two days later, however, Dr. King said he would stage another demonstration and attributed the violence to his own "miscalculation."

At the time he was assassinated in Memphis, Dr. King was involved in one of his greatest plans to dramatize the plight of the poor and stir Congress to help Negroes.

He called this venture the "Poor People's Campaign." It was to be a huge "camp-in" either in Washington or in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention.

In one of his last public announcements before the shooting, Dr. King told an audience in a Harlem church on March 26:

"We need an alternative to riots and to timid supplication. Nonviolence is our most potent weapon."

His strong beliefs in civil rights and nonviolence made him one of the leading opponents of American participation in the war in Vietnam. To him the war was unjust, diverting vast sums away from programs to alleviate the condition of the Negro poor in this country. He called the conflict "one of history's most cruel and senseless wars." Last January he said:

"We need to make clear in this political year, to Congressmen on both sides of the aisle and to the President of the United States that we will no longer vote for men who continue to see the killing of Vietnamese and Americans as the best way of advancing the goals of freedom and self- determination in Southeast Asia."

Object of Many Attacks

Inevitably, as a symbol of integration, he became the object of unrelenting attacks and vilification. His home was bombed. He was spat upon and mocked. He was struck and kicked. He was stabbed, almost fatally, by a deranged Negro woman. He was frequently thrown into jail. Threats became so commonplace that his wife could ignore burning crosses on the lawn and ominous phone calls. Through it all he adhered to the creed of passive disobedience that infuriated segregationists.

The adulation that was heaped upon him eventually irritated some Negroes in the civil rights movement who worked hard, but in relative obscurity. They pointed out - and Dr. King admitted - that he was a poor administrator. Sometimes, with sarcasm, they referred to him, privately, as "De Lawd." They noted that Dr. King's successes were built on the labors of may who had gone before him, the noncoms and privates of the civil rights army who fought without benefit of headlines and television cameras.

The Negro extremists he criticized were contemptuous of Dr. King. They dismissed his passion for nonviolence as another form of servility to white people. They called him an "Uncle Tom," and charged that he was hindering the Negro struggle for equality.

Dr. King's belief in nonviolence was subjected to intense pressure in 1966, when some Negro groups adopted the slogan "black power" in the aftermath of civil rights marches into Mississippi and race riots in Northern cities. He rejected the idea, saying:

"The Negro needs the white man to free him from his fears. The white man needs the Negro to free him from his guilt. A doctrine of black supremacy is as evil as a doctrine of white supremacy."

The doctrine of "black power" threatened to split the Negro civil rights movement and antagonize white liberals who had been supporting Negro causes, and Dr. King suggested "militant nonviolence" as a formula for progress with peace.

At the root of his civil rights convictions was an even more profound faith in the basic goodness of man and the great potential of American democracy. These beliefs gave to his speeches a fervor that could not be stilled by criticism.

Scores of millions of Americans - white as well as Negro - who sat before television sets in the summer of 1963 to watch the awesome march of some 200,000 Negroes on Washington were deeply stirred when Dr. King, in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial, said:

"Even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. 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.'"

And all over the world, men were moved as they read his words of Dec. 10, 1964, when he became the third member of his race to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

Insistent on Man's Destiny

"I refuse to accept the idea that man is mere flotsam and jetsam in the river of life which surrounds him," he said. "I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality.

"I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of thermonuclear destruction. I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant."

For the poor and unlettered of his own race, Dr. King spoke differently. There he embraced the rhythm and passion of the revivalist and evangelist. Some observers of Dr. King's technique said that others in the movement were more effective in this respect. But Dr. King had the touch, as he illustrated in a church in Albany, Ga., in 1962:

"So listen to me, children: Put on your marching shoes; don'cha get weary; though the path ahead may be dark and dreary; we're walking for freedom, children."

Or there was the meeting in Gadsen, Ala., late in 1963, when he displayed another side of his ability before an audience of poor Negroes. It went as follows:

King: I hear they are beating you.

Audience: Yes, yes.

King: I hear they are cursing you.

Audience: Yes, yes.

King: I hear they are going into your homes and doing nasty things and beating you.

Audience: Yes, yes.

King: Some of you have knives, and I ask you to put them up. Some of you have arms, and I ask you to put them up. Get the weapon of non-violence, the breastplate of righteousness, the armor of truth, and just keep marching."

It was said that so devoted was his vast following that even among illiterates he could, by calm discussion of Platonic dogma, evoke deep cries of "Amen."

Dr. King also had a way of reducing complex issues to terms that anyone could understand. Thus, in the summer of 1965, when there was widespread discontent among Negroes about their struggle for equality of employment, he declared:

"What good does it do to be able to eat at a lunch counter if you can't buy a hamburger."

The enormous impact of Dr. King's words was one of the reasons he was in the President's Room in the Capitol on Aug. 6, 1965, when President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act that struck down literacy tests, provided Federal registrars to assure the ballot to unregistered Negroes and marked the growth of the Negro as a political force in the South.

Backed by Organization

Dr. King's effectiveness was enhanced and given continuity by the fact that he had an organization behind him. Formed in 1960, with headquarters in Atlanta, it was called the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, familiarly known as SLICK. Allied with it was another organization formed under Dr. King's sponsorship the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, often referred to as SNICK.

These two organizations reached the country, though their basic strength was in the South. They brought together Negro clergymen, businessmen, professional men and students. They raised the money and planned the sit-ins, the campaigns for Negro vote registration, the demonstrations by which Negroes hacked away at segregationist resistance, lowering the barriers against Negroes in the political, economic and social life of the nation.

This minister, who became the most famous spokesman for Negro rights since Booker T. Washington, was not particularly impressive in appearance. About 5 feet 8 inches tall, he had an oval face with almond-shaped eyes that looked almost dreamy when he was off the platform. His neck and shoulders where heavily muscled, but his hands were almost delicate.

Speaker of Few Gestures

There was little of the rabblerouser in his oratory. He was not prone to extravagant gestures or loud peroration. His baritone voice, though vibrant, was not that of a spellbinder. Occasionally, after a particular telling sentence, he would tilt his head a bit and fall silent as though waiting for the echoes of his thought to spread through the hall, church or street.

In private gatherings, Dr. King lacked that laughing gregariousness that often makes for popularity. Some thought he was without a sense of humor. He was not a gifted raconteur. He did not have the flamboyance of a Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr. or the cool strategic brilliance of Roy Wilkins, head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

What Dr. King did have was an instinct for the right moment to make his moves. Some critics looked upon this as pure opportunism. Nevertheless, it was this sense of timing that raised him in 1955, from a newly arrived minister in Montgomery, Ala., with his first church, to a figure of national prominence.

Bus Boycott in Progress

Negroes in that city had begun a boycott of buses to win the right to sit where they pleased instead of being forced to move to the rear of buses, in Southern tradition or to surrender seats to white people when a bus was crowded.

The 381-day boycott by Negroes was already under way when the young pastor was placed in charge of the campaign. It has been said that one of the reasons he got the job was because he was so new in the area he had not antagonized any of the Negro factions. Even while the boycott was under way, a board of directors handled the bulk of administrative work.

However, it was Dr. King who dramatized the boycott with his decision to make it the testing ground, before the eyes of the nation, of his belief in the civil disobedience teachings of Thoreau and Gandhi. When he was arrested during the Montgomery boycott, he said:

"If we are arrested every day, if we are exploited every day, if we are trampled over every day, don't ever let anyone pull you so low as to hate them. We must use the weapon of love. We must have compassion and understanding for those who hate us. We must realize so many people are taught to hate us that they are not totally responsible for their hate. But we stand in life at midnight; we are always on the threshold of a new dawn."

Home Bombed in Absence

Even more dramatic, in some ways, was his reaction to the bombing of his home during the boycott. He was away at the time and rushed back fearful for his wife and children. They were not injured. But when he reached the modest house, more than a thousand Negroes had already gathered and were in an ugly mood, seeking revenge against the white people. The police were jittery. Quickly, Dr. King pacified the crowd and there was no trouble.

Dr. King was even more impressive during the "big push" in Birmingham, which began in April, 1963. With the minister at the limelight, Negroes there began a campaign of sit-ins at lunch counters, picketing and protest marches. Hundreds of children, used in the campaign, were jailed.

The entire world was stirred when the police turned dogs on the demonstrators. Dr. King was jailed for five days. While he was in prison he issued a 9,000-word letter that created considerable controversy among white people, alienating some sympathizers who thought Dr. King was being too aggressive.

Moderates Called Obstacles

In the letter he wrote:

"I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace, which is the absence of tension, to a positive peace, which is the presence of justice."

Some critics of Dr. King said that one reason for this letter was to answer Negro intellectuals, such as the wrier James Baldwin, who were impatient with Dr. King's belief in brotherhood. Whatever the reasons, the role of Dr. King in Birmingham added to his stature and showed that his enormous following was deeply devoted to him.

He demonstrated this in a threatening situation in Albany, Ga., after four Negro girls were killed in the bombing of a church. Dr. King said at the funeral:

"In spite of the darkness of this hour, we must not despair. We must not lose faith in our white brothers."

As Dr. King's words grew more potent and he was invited to the White House by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, some critics - Negroes as well as white - noted that sometimes, despite all the publicity he attracted, he left campaigns unfinished or else failed to attain his goals.

Dr. King was aware of this. But he pointed out, in 1964, in St Augustine, Fla., one of the toughest civil rights battlegrounds, that there were important intangibles.

"Even if we do not get all we should," he said, "movements such as this tend more and more to give a Negro the sense of self-respect that he needs. It tends to generate courage in Negroes outside the movement. It brings intangible results outside the community where it is carried out. There is a hardening of attitudes in situations like this. But other cities see and say: 'We don't want to be another Albany or Birmingham,' and they make changes. Some communities, like this one, had to bear the cross."

It was in this city that Negroes marched into the fists of the mob singing: "We love everybody."

Conscious of Leading Role

There was no false modesty in Dr. King's self appraisal of his role in the civil rights movement.

"History," he said, "has thrust me into this position. It would be both immoral and a sign of ingratitude if I did not face my moral responsibility to do what I can in this struggle."

Another time he compared himself to Socrates as one of "the creative gadflies of society."

At times he addressed himself deliberately to the white people of the nations. Once, he said:

"We will match your capacity to inflict suffering with our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force. We will not hate you, but we cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws ... We will soon wear you down by our capacity to suffer. And in winning our freedom we will so appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process."

The enormous influence of Dr. King's voice in the turbulent racial conflict reached into New York in 1964. In the summer of that year racial rioting exploded in New York and in other Northern cities with large Negro populations. There was widespread fear that the disorders, particularly in Harlem, might set of unprecedented racial violence.

At this point Dr. King became one of the major intermediaries in restoring order. He conferred with Mayor Robert F. Wagner and with Negro leaders. A statement was issued, of which he was one of the signers, calling for "a broad curtailment if not total moratorium on mass demonstrations until after Presidential elections."

The following year, Dr. King was once more in the headlines and on television - this time leading a drive for Negro voter registration in Selma, Ala. Negroes were arrested by the hundreds. Dr. King was punched and kicked by a white man when, during this period of protest, he became the first Negro to register at a century-old hotel in Selma.

Martin Luther King Jr. was born Jan. 15, 1929, in Atlanta on Auburn Avenue. As a child his name was Michael Luther King and so was his father's. His father changed both their names legally to Martin Luther King in honor of the Protestant reformer.

Auburn Avenue is one of the nation's most widely known Negro sections. Many successful Negro business or professional men have lived there. The Rev. Martin Luther King Sr. was pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church at Jackson Street and Auburn Avenue.

Young Martin went to Atlanta's Morehouse College, a Negro institution whose students acquired what was sometimes called the "Morehouse swank." The president of Morehouse, Dr. B. E. Mays, took a special interest in Martin, who had decided, in his junior year, to be a clergyman.

He was ordained a minister in his father's church in 1947. It was in this church he was to say, some years later:

"America, you're strayed away. You've trampled over 19 million of your brethren. All men are created equal. Not some men. Not white men. All men. America, rise up and come home."

Before Dr. King had his own church he pursued his studies in the integrated Crozier Theological Seminary, in Chester, Pa. He was one of six Negroes in a student body of about a hundred. He became the first Negro class president. He was named the outstanding student and won a fellowship to study for a doctorate at the school of his choice. The young man enrolled at Boston College in 1951.

For his doctoral thesis he sought to resolve the differences between the Harvard theologian Paul Tillich and the neo-naturalist philosopher Henry Nelson Wieman. During this period he took courses at Harvard, as well.

While he was working on his doctorate he met Coretta Scott, a graduate of Antioch College, who was doing graduate work in music. He married the singer in 1953. They had four children, Yolanda, Martin Luther King 3d, Dexter Scott and Bernice.

In 1954, Dr. King became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala. At that time few of Montgomery's white residents saw any reason for a major dispute with the city's 50,000 Negroes. They did not seem to realize how deeply the Negroes resented segregated seating on buses, for instance.

Revolt Begun by Woman

On Dec. 1, 1955, they learned, almost by accident. Mrs. Rosa Parks, a Negro seamstress, refused to comply with a bus driver's order to give up her seat to a white passenger. She was tired, she said. Her feet hurt from a day of shopping.

Mrs. Parks had been a local secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. She was arrested, convicted of refusing to obey the bus conductor and fined $10 and costs, a total of $14. Almost as spontaneous as Mrs. Parks's act was the rallying of many Negro leaders in the city to help her.

From a protest begun over a Negro woman's tired feet Dr. King began his public career.

In 1959, Dr. King and his family moved back to Atlanta, where he became a co-pastor, with his father, of the Ebenezer Baptist Church.

As his fame increased, public interest in his beliefs led him to write books. It was while he was autographing one of these books, "Stride Toward Freedom," in a Harlem department store that he was stabbed by a Negro woman.

It was in these books that he summarized, in detail, his beliefs as well as his career. Thus, in "Why We Can't Wait," he wrote:

"The Negro knows he is right. He has not organized for conquest or to gain spoils or to enslave those who have injured him. His goal is not to capture that which belongs to someone else. He merely wants, and will have, what is honorably his."

The possibility that he might someday be assassinated was considered by Dr. King on June 5, 1964, when he reported, in St. Augustine, Fla., that his life had been threatened. He said:

"Well, if physical death is the price that I must pay to free my white brothers and sisters from a permanent death of the spirit, then nothing can be more redemptive."

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Martin Luther King Jr.'s Original New York Times Obituary

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To many millions of American Negroes, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was the prophet of their crusade for racial equality. He was their voice of anguish, their eloquence in humiliation, their battle cry for human dignity. He forged for them the weapons of nonviolence that withstood and blunted the ferocity of segregation.

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Martin Luther King Jr. remains frozen in time for many Americans. Seared into our consciousness is the man who battled Southern segregation.

We see him standing before hundreds of thousands of followers in the nation's capital in 1963, proclaiming his dream for racial harmony. We see him marching, arms locked with fellow protesters, through the battleground of Alabama in 1965.

But on the 50th anniversary of his death, it is worth noting how his message and his priorities had evolved by the time he was shot on that balcony at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis in 1968. Dr. King was confronting many challenges that remain with us today.

He was battling racism in the North then, not just in the South. He was pushing the government to address poverty, income inequality, structural racism and segregation in cities like Boston and Chicago. He was also calling for an end to a war that was draining the national treasury of funds needed to finance a progressive domestic agenda.

This may not be the Dr. King that many remember. Yet, his words resonate powerfully - and, perhaps, uncomfortably - today in a country that remains deeply divided on issues of race and class.

"All the issues that he raised toward the end of his life are as contemporary now as they were then," said Taylor Branch, the Pulitzer-Prize winning historian who has written several books about Dr. King.

It is no surprise that Americans remember the man who focused on demolishing the legal underpinnings of Jim Crow.

Holding on to the memory of the earlier Dr. King allows us to focus on our nation's progress, not on the deeply entrenched problems that remain.

"Policy makers of the white society have caused the darkness; they created discrimination; they structured slums; and they perpetuate unemployment, ignorance and poverty," Dr. King said in 1967, referring to bias in zoning, public budgets and employment.

His marches into northern white neighborhoods touched off a backlash among white leaders and residents who had supported similar tactics in the south. His popularity plummeted.

His call for an interracial coalition to demand "jobs or income now" was greeted skeptically by some of his supporters and by members of the Black Power movement.

His call for an end to the Vietnam War outraged President Lyndon Johnson, lawmakers and others. Even some of his aides doubted the wisdom of that decision and his plan to mobilize a poor people's campaign.

"He was far more visionary than those around him," said Clayborne Carson, the director of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute at Stanford University.

What would Dr. King make of America today?

Historians believe he would marvel at the expansion of rights for women and the LGBTQ community, the growth of the black middle class and the number of black elected leaders, including America's first black president.

He would also see a country beset by many of the problems he had urged Americans to focus on during the last years of his life.

"I think we should have listened to him then," Mr. Branch said. "We really ought to listen to him now."

Part One

Enduring Issues

As Martin Luther King Jr. shifted from integration, he tried to stabilize a vast civil rights movement, pushed for the rights of the sanitation workers in Memphis, and organized a campaign for the poor. A look at those issues then and now.

Part Two

Shots Fired

On April 4, 1968, Dr. King was assassinated in Memphis by a fugitive named James Earl Ray. That an advocate of peace met a violent end shook the country and spurred a rethinking of gun laws.

Part Three

In Memoriam

A look at how the country dealt with the loss of Dr. King and his rebirth as the benevolent figure he is known as today.

Designed and produced by Darcy Eveleigh, Rebecca Lieberman and Sandra Stevenson. Video production by Meghean Felling. Additional photo research by Morrigan McCarthy and Jeff Roth. Photo restoration by Sonny Figueroa and Alessandra Montalto.

Video footage: Archive Films, via Getty Images. Time Image, via Getty Images. Onyx Media, via Getty Images. Hearst Newsreel, via Getty Images.

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50 Years Later, Remembering King, and the Battles That Outlived Him

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Martin Luther King Jr. remains frozen in time for many Americans. Seared into our consciousness is the man who battled Southern segregation. We see him standing before hundreds of thousands of followers in the nation's capital in 1963, proclaiming his dream for racial harmony.

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Turning to the final chapters of King's life, HBO's " King in the Wilderness," airing on April 2, presents an image of King that might be familiar to academics and leftist activists but unrecognizable to many Americans. The filmmakers pulled hundreds of news accounts from 1968-2014 about King, said Peter Kunhardt, the director. In most, he said, "the reporter would summarize him with the 'I Have a Dream' speech." He went on, "It never went beyond that. So we were pleased to not deal with that aspect and look at the nightmare the dream turned into."

Relying heavily on " At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68," the final book in Taylor Branch's King trilogy (Mr. Branch is also an executive producer), the film portrays King as both dejected and rejected. He is disillusioned by the turn from civil rights to Black Power among a younger generation of African-Americans and the backlash he receives for protesting racial injustice in northern cities like Chicago, opposing the Vietnam War, and demanding fair pay and equitable working conditions for black laborers.

For Trey Ellis, an executive producer, presenting King not as a towering figure but as an outsider was part of what drew him to the project. King "actually outlived his legend," Mr. Ellis said. "I think the documentary is really important in showing he did deal with contemporary issues we're dealing with right now." He added, "Even when the press had turned against him, when black people turned against him and saw nonviolence as soft, and whites saw him as a communist. Even his own advisers were questioning him. He just put his head down and did the work."

"King in the Wilderness" benefits from its counterintuitive approach. We see the continuing influence of King's wife, Coretta, to carry on with his nonviolent philosophy, particularly his stance against the Vietnam War. In one compelling moment, Xernona Clayton, an event organizer for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, celebrates King's birthday by giving him gag gifts that will help him when he's arrested. King, though clearly tired, is tickled by the gesture.

In order to crystallize the moral courage of King's nonviolence, however, all three films share an antipathy toward the Black Power movement that will fully blossom in 1968. For Jeanne Theoharis, author of "A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History, " such narratives present a two-dimensional sense of the relationship between the civil rights and Black Power movements and obscure how their conflicts existed earlier as well. "I think there are real debates going on in the mid-1960s in the black freedom struggle about black power," she said. "Clearly not everyone is on the same page. Even if Malcolm X is super hated in the early 1960s, it doesn't mean that King is loved."

Television news stoked this tension. "Black Power and the movement that emerged in the mid-1960s complicated the narrative" for many journalists, said Phil Bertelsen, a producer and co-director of "Hope & Fury." "A simple straightforward narrative of good versus evil now was a little bit more nuanced." Not only did nightly news seem to require a charismatic male civil rights leader like King, but as "Hope & Fury" shows, it also prioritized black suffering over black self-defense, making the rise of the Black Panther Party ill-suited for a prime-time white audience.

"Toward the end of his career, King began to castigate the media for focusing solely on the most famous personalities and spectacular events," said Brandon Terry, editor of the essay collection "Fifty Years Since MLK." Mr. Terry suggests that King gave us a glimpse of his new strategy in his book "Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?," written a year before his death.

"More and more, the civil rights movement will become engaged in the task of organizing people into permanent groups to protect their own interests and to produce change in their behalf," King wrote. "This task is tedious, and lacks the drama of demonstrations, but it is necessary for meaningful results."

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hope & fury: mlk  the movement and the media (tv program)

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Seeing Martin Luther King Jr. in a New Light

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Turning to the final chapters of King's life, HBO's " King in the Wilderness," airing on April 2, presents an image of King that might be familiar to academics and leftist activists but unrecognizable to many Americans. The filmmakers pulled hundreds of news accounts from 1968-2014 about King, said Peter Kunhardt, the director.

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Americans both black and white often use the civil-rights leader's memory more to chide black youth than to inspire them.

Fred W. McDarrah / Getty / Thanh Do / The Atlantic

The structure of the column was such that he answered several questions at a time, so the advice was meant to be brief. Even so, these answers don't feel as measured and considered as so much of King's written work dealing with issues of racism and American life. To be fair, he responded to both men's and women's inquiries about marital problems by first advising a "self-analysis," but his answers to men did not rely upon old sexist tropes about nagging wives. And he was still fairly young at the time of this writing: only 28 years old when he started the column, and only about four years into his own marriage. Perhaps some of his views matured later. But these details only make the question of why he was even approached for this sort of gig even more curious.

One clue as to an explanation comes from Jet magazine, the sister publication to Ebony, where an advertisement for King's advice column included the line: "Let the man that led the Montgomery boycott lead you into happier living."

Fifty years after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, his legacy is still being written.
Read more

There's no reason to presume King would have any useful insight on "happier living," except to connect his moral and ethical stand against injustice to a deeper emotional intelligence. The two don't always go together. Nevertheless, the image of King as a moral leader was already being used as a way to influence more than just the political destiny of the country, but as a guidepost for how to live and conduct yourself in every aspect of life.

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Martin Luther King's Idealized Masculinity Is Impossible to Live Up To

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Americans both black and white often use the civil-rights leader's memory more to chide black youth than to inspire them. The structure of the column was such that he answered several questions at a time, so the advice was meant to be brief.

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Courtesy of HBO

The new HBO documentary King in the Wilderness offers a poignant look at the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., a man who's been immortalized for his life's work, but saw personal and professional struggles in the last three years of his life.

The movie, which debuts Monday, April 2, arrives a few days before the 50 th anniversary of his assassination at a Memphis, Tenn. motel and offers those new to King's philosophies and longtime admirers of him a chance to see into his inner circle.

In 1965, he pivoted from tackling civil rights head on and went on to address housing discrimination in Chicago, poverty and the Vietnam War, which he opposed. He continued to make powerful enemies, from the FBI to the mayor of Chicago, Richard Daley, who wanted King out of his city and expressed that in secret recordings to President Lyndon Johnson.

To make this moving documentary, director Peter Kunhardt traveled to the South, and with the help of writer Trey Ellis and Pulitzer-Prize winning historian Taylor Branch, spoke to notable figures such as Harry Belafonte, Jesse Jackson and Xernona Clayton, who worked closely with the civil rights leader until his death in 1968.

"Everybody left him," Clayton said at the New York premiere of the film at The Riverside Church. "He said, 'I can understand my enemies not supporting me, but my friends? How could they go off and leave me? How could they not understand? I've always talked about how war is evil; there is no victory in war.'"

Viewers will connect with King in the Wilderness not because it's another documentary on King, but because it offers an unguarded look at a man far removed from the person he was in 1963 when he delivered "I Have a Dream" at the March on Washington. It shows a man who struggled with his place in a movement where some began to reject his beliefs, where he was a target from all sides and someone who seemed to have made peace that he wasn't going to be around for much longer.

"Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop," King said in his "I've been to the mountaintop" speech delivered a day before he died. "Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place, but I'm not concerned about that now."

It's clear that the filmmakers behind King in the Wilderness want people to see King in a different light. To show that he wasn't always the confident leader that history remembers him as. Kunhardt shows a man, who despite his challenges and feelings of isolation in the movement, never gave up. They hope that King continues to serve as an inspiration to those wanting to make a difference.

Check out the trailer below.

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'King in the Wilderness' Shows an Unguarded Martin Luther King Jr.

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The new HBO documentary King in the Wilderness offers a poignant look at the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., a man who's been immortalized for his life's work, but saw personal and professional struggles in the last three years of his life.

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Martin Luther King: his life and legacy - in pictures

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On the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, we look back at the highlights of his life, and his enduring legacy

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For U.S. civil rights icon Jesse Jackson, the wounds from Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination are as fresh today as they were on the day it happened nearly five decades ago, on April 4, 1968.

Jackson told The National's Rosemary Barton that he's haunted by that moment, especially when he travels to Memphis, Tenn., where it happened.

"It was an awfully tragic moment, " he said. "The scab comes off and the sore is still raw."
Watch the full interview with Rosemary Barton on The National: Sunday, April 1, at 9:00 p.m. ET.
Early activism

Jackson became King's protege in the civil rights struggle in the early 1960s. But his activism began early in life.

Born in Greenville, S.C., Jackson grew up with segregation and was arrested in 1960 for entering a whites-only public library.

He told CBC News back in 1988 that growing up in that environment lit the fire of his activism.

"Suffice it to say, I grew up under the laws of apartheid in this country, lived under racial segregation, an environment that fostered low expectations," he said.

"Something told me I could make a difference."

By 1965, Jackson threw himself into King's movement, marching with him at key moments, including the historical march in Selma, Ala., to demonstrate the lack of voting rights for African-Americans.

Following King's death, Jackson forged his own path in the civil rights movement, eventually creating the Rainbow-Push Coalition, an organization dedicated to social justice. He was ordained a Baptist minister in 1968.

Power to vote

Providing black Americans with greater visibility in electoral politics has long been a theme in Jackson's career.

He ran for president as a Democrat twice in 1984, and again in 1988, where he won seven million votes and finished second to the eventual candidate Michael Dukakis.

Jackson says the power to vote is one of King's key legacies for people seeking social justice both in his lifetime and today.

"He bequeathed to us the right to vote which we never did have," he said.

"At that time blacks couldn't vote for 85 years, 18-year-olds couldn't vote ... but that became a new force in American politics."

Jackson told The National he sees the endurance of that legacy in the activism of students who organized and participated in the March for Our Lives, protesting the NRA and pushing for stricter gun laws in the wake of the Parkland Florida school shooting.

"In some sense these kids are saying, 'Hands up, don't shoot - vote,'" he said.

"Today we have four million high school seniors who can register to vote...we're not just marching in the streets, we're marching to the polls."

Jackson himself has persisted with his activism despite some stumbles, including accusations of anti-Semitism for remarks he made during his 1984 presidential campaign.

He also faced personal controversy when he admitted to fathering a child outside his marriage in 2001.

Jackson was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in August 2017, but continues to speak out on issues such as the killings of unarmed black men by police and the widening gap between the rich and poor in America.

Jackson draws a line between the trauma of King's life and death and the election of Barack Obama 40 years later.

"One bullet can't stop a movement. It was 40 years in the wilderness, but we never stopped working, we never stopped raising our voices and building coalitions," he said.

"[King] left us a legacy to fight back and we're still fighting."

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Jesse Jackson reflects on Martin Luther King's legacy 50 years after his assassination | CBC News

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For U.S. civil rights icon Jesse Jackson, the wounds from Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination are as fresh today as they were on the day it happened nearly five decades ago, on April 4, 1968. Jackson told The National's Rosemary Barton that he's haunted by that moment, especially when he travels to Memphis, Tenn., where it happened.

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In the decades since his assassination on 4 April 1968, Martin Luther King Jr has been sanitised and sanctified; coopted and embraced by the American establishment as a bland, unthreatening saint of racial equality.

In truth, he was a radical dissenter who challenged the political, economic and military status quo at least as much as African American militants like Huey Newton of the Black Panthers and Malcolm X of the Nation of Islam. Hence the FBI's obsessive, relentless attempts to discredit King and those around him, including smears that he was a communist, traitor, adulterer and pervert.

Now, many people think of King solely as a black rights champion. But he was much more than that. He opposed the US war in Vietnam, supported striking workers and demanded economic justice for poor Americans, black and white. No wonder Washington insiders saw him as a dangerous radical and a threat to the social order.

King's civil rights campaign played a pivotal role in ending racial segregation and the denial of voting rights to African Americans in the southern states. It also created a cultural shift in attitudes on race issues in much, but not all, of the US.

In the Deep South, long after race equality was secured in law, statues commemorating pro-slavery Confederate leaders remained on their plinths and new ones were added. The Confederate flag continued to be flown from many public and private buildings. This was proof that changing the law to end racist discrimination and voter suppression was not enough.

The focus of the black civil rights movement was legal equality. While this was understandable and the immediate priority, it also had a downside. Once official discrimination was ended and formal legal equality won, the movement dissipated. The direction, coherence, dynamism and coordination that were its great strengths, and powered its many successes, were lost. Moreover, racism was not vanquished. It continued to plague the lives of African Americans. Civil rights was not the panacea that many had assumed.

This illustrates the danger inherent in any struggle that is pivoted on the sole and limited goal of equal rights. King understood this limitation. That's why, post legal equality, he wanted to push the movement into a new phase focussing on economic injustice, which he saw as the other major factor holding back African Americans. He also saw this agenda as a means to transcend the racial divide by uniting disenfranchised black and white people in a common struggle for economic emancipation.

Half a century after the end of racially discriminatory statutes in the US, we see the stark limitations of mere equality. The informal segregation of black and white communities in some parts of the US is almost as great as it was back in Dr King's day. While the black middle class has gained hugely since the 1960s, millions of poor black people are just as locked out of economic upliftment as they were prior to the start of the civil rights era.

Too many black districts of major cities and rural communities remain blighted by slum housing, unemployment and sub-standard education and healthcare. The racist bias in the criminal justice system means that black people continue to account for 40 per cent of the prison population, despite being only 12 per cent of the population overall. All this is further evidence that the legal equality striven for, and won, by the heroic civil rights activists was, by itself, insufficient.

In pictures: Martin Luther King Jr's campaign for civil rights
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Indeed, today, King's legacy looks shaky and some fear it is being reversed. In a throwback to Jim Crow discrimination, recent US elections have been marred by voter registration and ballot rules that are biased against African Americans. Percentages of black people working in senior posts in federal agencies have recently declined. The repeated, ceaseless police killing of unarmed black people is, to some, another form of lynching. And, as in the pre-civil rights days, few officers have faced disciplinary action.

This has fuelled the Black Lives Matter movement, which many see as the civil rights movement mark 2. They cite the need to continue what King began but, cut short by an assassin's bullet, never finished - the dream of a non-racial America.

My personal memories of Martin Luther King Jr stretch back to 1963, when I was 11 years old and at school in suburban Melbourne, Australia. I read a news report about the Ku Klux Klan bombing of a black church in Birmingham, Alabama, when four young girls about my own age were murdered. How could anyone kill another innocent human being, I thought, let alone four little girls in church on Sunday morning?

It prompted my interest in, and support for, the freedom struggle of African Americans and, in particular, the work of Dr King. Given my then devout Christian upbringing, I readily related to him as a Baptist pastor. To me, he was fulfilling the love and compassion of the gospels.

When I began my first campaign, aged 15 in 1967, I looked to Martin Luther King and the black civil rights movement as a model for how to do effective activism. They became my template. I adapted their ideals and methods to my early campaigns for Aboriginal rights, repeal of the death penalty and conscription, Australian withdrawal from the Vietnam War, LGBT liberation - and all my subsequent human rights work.

I was 17 when I realised I was gay in 1969. There were no LGBT organisations, not even any helplines, in Melbourne. So I took my inspiration from the black civil rights movement. I reasoned that just as black people were an oppressed minority, so were LGBT people and that we had a similar claim to human rights. If people in power ignored our just claim, it was, I argued, morally justified and politically necessary to resort to non-violent direct action and civil disobedience, in the footsteps of Dr King.

I have applied this rationale in my 50-plus years of LGBT and human rights campaigning, involving more than 3,000 protests and over 100 arrests.

This I owe Martin Luther King. I learned from him how to make social change, as he learned from Mohandas Gandhi via his fellow civil rights activist, Bayard Rustin, who introduced King to Gandhi's ideas and non-violent tactics of passive resistance. Indeed, Rustin was a key thinker, strategist and organiser of the black civil rights movement but selflessly chose to stay in the shadows because he feared that this homosexuality and left-wing views would be used by the media, politicians and the FBI to discredit the movement.

As we reflect on this 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King's assassination, there is no doubt in my mind that his enduring legacy is the continued relevance of his ideals and methods to every movement for social change, worldwide. He fought a specific struggle with a universal applicability.

His model of non-violent resistance was echoed in the Greenham Common anti-nuclear protests, OutRage! direct action against anti-LGBT laws and, further afield, the Czech "velvet revolution" that ended communist tyranny and the "people power" demonstrations that bought down the Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos.

Right now, King's aspirations are being played out in the Black Lives Matter movement, which is a continuation of what he began. And all across every corner of the earth - from Russia to Iran, Ethiopia, West Papua, Balochistan and China - people yearning for freedom are challenging despotism using similar non-violent methods.

Martin Luther King Jr is 50 years dead. But his vision lives on and will remain a potent inspiration for global social activism for decades to come. Bravo!

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How Martin Luther King's legacy continues to be relevant for social change

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In the decades since his assassination on 4 April 1968, Martin Luther King Jr has been sanitised and sanctified; coopted and embraced by the American establishment as a bland, unthreatening saint of racial equality.

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Fifty years after his death, the vision of racial equality that King outlined on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial remains elusive.

Jason Sokol, a history professor at the University of New Hampshire, said there have been some advances for African-Americans over the years, culminating in the 2008 election of Barack Obama, American's first black president.

But racial inequalities persist, "especially when you look at black poverty, the black incarceration rate and the issue of police brutality," said Sokol, author of "The Heavens Might Crack: The Death and Legacy of Martin Luther King Jr."

Taylor, the University of Buffalo professor, stressed that by the time of his death, King's ambitions had gone "beyond civil rights to embrace human rights."

"King's dream was anchored around imagining another possible world based on economic, social, political and racial justice -- things related to a good education, decent and affordable housing, good jobs with a living wage, quality and accessible health care," he said.

"So when we add flesh to King's dream, we realize that we haven't really made much progress over the last 50 years in the realization of that dream," he said.

"While certainly there have been changes in the racial attitudes of individuals, the racism that is embedded in institutions and in structures in the United States has not changed much at all."

King's legacy

At the same time, King's legacy looms large in myriad ways.

"King said in his Nobel Prize lecture in 1964 that the Freedom Movement was spreading the widest liberation in human history," said Taylor Branch, author of "America in the King Years," a trilogy about King's life and the civil rights era.

"He was referring to worldwide and not just for black people," said Branch, an executive producer of the documentary "King in the Wilderness" which airs on HBO on Monday.

"In many respects it has succeeded beyond his imagination," Branch said.

"I don't think -- at a time when homosexual behavior was not talked about but was even criminal -- he would have dreamed we would have marriage equality," Branch said. "Or a black president. Or all the gains that have been accrued for women."

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Martin Luther King Jr: the dream, the man, the legacy

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Fifty years after his death, the vision of racial equality that King outlined on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial remains elusive. Jason Sokol, a history professor at the University of New Hampshire, said there have been some advances for African-Americans over the years, culminating in the 2008 election of Barack Obama, American's first black president.

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Justin Evans will go to Morehouse College this fall, the alma mater of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He studied Dr. King last summer as part of a select group chosen for a leadership program in Atlanta.

"That kind of opened my eyes up to be like, 'Wow, this is a place I want to attend and be successful like MLK,'" he said.

The Plainfield North High School senior said the civil rights icon has inspired him ever since.

"As long as we continue to use our voice, I believe that we can continue to keep the movement of Dr. King alive," he said.

Evans is also part of a mentoring group in Aurora called, "Boys 2 Men." Their leader, Clayton Muhammad, called this special meeting at city hall.

"These young people of course weren't around when he was here, so it's integral to look 50 years later and see the work that they're doing from academics, to social justice to the ministry," he said. "They're so key to perpetuating the King legacy."

Alonso Cisneros, a senior at West Aurora High School, is the recipient of New York University's MLK Scholar Award. He said King helps keep him going.

"He is that symbol of hope, and no matter how difficult things get for me, no matter what the color of my skin is, that I can do anything I set my mind to," he said.

"What I found was particularly moving was not only the fact that he was able to be so influential in creating change, but the fact that he was so influential in creating unity," said Rohan Chakrabarty, a member of the group and a senior at Metea Valley High School.

The group's meeting concluded with a candlelight tribute to Dr. King, and a reminder that his spirit lives on in them.

Aurora's first black mayor, Richard Irvin, will give his State of the City address Tuesday, April 3, in honor of King's famous "Mountaintop Speech," which was delivered on the same day in 1968.

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Chicago area teens reflect on Martin Luther King's legacy

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Justin Evans will go to Morehouse College this fall, the alma mater of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He studied Dr. King last summer as part of a select group chosen for a leadership program in Atlanta. "That kind of opened my eyes up to be like, 'Wow, this is a place I want to attend and be successful like MLK,'" he said.

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The Whitewashing-and Resurrection-of Dr. King's Legacy

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Eddie Glaude Jr. writes that even 50 years after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, we are seeing seismic shifts in our politics.

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KORVA COLEMAN, HOST:

Time now for The Call-In.

(SOUNDBITE OF CORDUROI'S "MY DEAR")

COLEMAN: Fifty years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tenn. His life has come to symbolize the struggle for freedom, equality and justice. We asked listeners if they see King's dream alive today.

ROBERT KOENIG: Hello. My name is Robert Koenig. I live in Bartlett, Tenn.

COLEMAN: That's right outside of Memphis. Robert Koenig believes that if King returned to the city now, he'd be deeply disappointed.

KOENIG: He'd find a troubled school system as segregated as it was on that day in 1968. He'd find thousands of African-Americans living in poverty and crime-infested ghettos. We are no closer to the mountaintop than we were on the day he died. And that's a shame.

COLEMAN: However, Maria Gil of Central Valley, N.Y., called in with a more hopeful take.

MARIA GIL: Prejudice and injustice still exist but so does the spirit of Martin Luther King. We saw it in the kids' marches that took place all over the world. And we'll keep seeing it.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS #1: Never again. Never again.

COLEMAN: From the student-led March for Our Lives rallies around the country to this weekend's Black Lives Matter demonstrations in Sacramento.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: What do we want?

UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS #2: Justice.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: What do we want?

UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS #2: Justice.

COLEMAN: Nonviolent protest was a powerful tool to bring about the dream Dr. King envisioned. But what really was his dream? To explore that, we called up Dr. Clayborne Carson of Stanford University, who edited and published Dr. King's papers. He says Dr. King had a deep commitment to social change, one that went beyond civil rights.

CLAYBORNE CARSON: People call him a civil rights leader. But he did that only because he happened to be living in Montgomery at the time when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat. I think his basic commitment was as a minister. He didn't retire after the passage of the Voting Rights Act in '65.

The next year, he was in Chicago trying to deal with some of the problems we still have today, the problems of the urban north. And I think for him, it was a wonderful victory to get civil rights legislation passed, but it simply made the South more like the rest of the nation. And the rest of the nation had a lot of serious problems.

COLEMAN: Fifty years ago, what was Dr. King's vision for America?

CARSON: Well, first of all, I think he saw things in global terms. He understood that issues like poverty, war, the lack of a sense of community - in one of his early papers, he says, you know, I want to deal with unemployment, slums, economic insecurity. And he didn't mean simply for black people. And that's what he was doing on the day he died. I think that was his true commitment.

COLEMAN: Do you think that vision's been realized today?

CARSON: Of course not. I think that he was probably less popular, certainly, than when he gave the I Have A Dream speech because he was confronting issues that we are still confronting today because they deal with the self-interest of many of us, you know? Many of us want social justice, but we don't want low-income housing in our neighborhood. So I think that it's always going to be more difficult to achieve changes that require major commitments of resources.

COLEMAN: Are there ways in which Dr. King's vision has been taken in a direction today with which he might disagree?

CARSON: I don't know if he would disagree with those people who are saying we should bring about change. He might disagree, sometimes, with the methods. He was strongly committed to nonviolent methods, but that doesn't mean he was against things that disrupted the peace. He understood that only when our normal routines are disrupted do we really pay attention to issues.

COLEMAN: And do you see generational differences in how people perceive Dr. King's work and legacy?

CARSON: I do. I think that for young people today, they weren't around when the civil rights bills were passed. So I think they have a purer notion of King. It's not - they see him as a symbol for social justice, a symbol for human rights. And that applies to their issues.

So I think that they see him as someone who would be supportive of Black Lives Matter and all the movements that are happening today because those are the issues that were left unfinished at the end of his life. I'm pretty sure from studying him for the last 30 years that he would be right out there with them.

COLEMAN: That's Dr. Clayborne Carson, director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. So let's hear from a younger activist who's been inspired by Dr. King's legacy - Bree Newsome. In 2015, she drew national attention when she climbed the flagpole in front of the South Carolina Statehouse and took down the Confederate flag that was there. Bree Newsome, welcome.

BREE NEWSOME: Thank you for having me.

COLEMAN: We heard from Dr. Carson about the generational differences in the perception of Dr. King's legacy. What is your take?

NEWSOME: I would agree with his assessment. Young activists today really seem to focus on the latter part of King's life and when you look at King's last work - for instance, where do we go from here, community or chaos? - he's basically reflecting on what has been accomplished with the passage of the Civil Rights Acts but also acknowledging that, you know, the Watts riots came right after. So, clearly, simply passing the civil rights legislation while very important did not address deeper issues of poverty and of human rights.

COLEMAN: How was the role of class played into today's social activism? Can you talk about that?

NEWSOME: Yeah. I think classism has always been a factor in civil rights. But I think more recently, what we have seen is that middle-class black Americans have benefited from the gains of the civil rights movement, I think, in ways that the majority of black Americans have not. And things like mass incarceration, the war on drugs, welfare reform in the '90s, all of those things hit low-income black Americans much more harshly.

And so I think when we are looking at the modern civil rights movement or Black Lives Matter, you see those same kind of realities or tensions. Well, those who are most impacted most immediately by police brutality are those who are living in poor areas.

COLEMAN: You've written about this. In your activism around police violence, you actually have had to confront older civil rights advocates over tactics and what they think Dr. King would approve and your vision.

NEWSOME: Yes. And I think it's not even always necessarily about what King would have approved of but I think just in the moment, you know, making tactical decisions. The sit-in movements, for instance, of the '60s are celebrated now. But at the time, that was something that had never been seen before. And so it was a very radical act.

Similarly, the protest that you see young people engaging in today, blocking traffic, when you look back and you make that comparison, it makes sense that there would be some tension because I think those who lived through the time of Dr. King, they are aware of, you know, the reforms that came about or the progress that may have been made. But the fact of the matter is that this is still what we are experiencing as young black people in America. And we can't wait any longer.

COLEMAN: Do you think it's time for a new letter from a Birmingham jail encouraging people away from comfortableness and toward action?

NEWSOME: Yes. Absolutely. And I think this administration represents a very direct and blatant attack on civil rights in really trying to undo the civil rights movement. And so this is a moment very similar to the time and context in which Martin Luther King, Jr. was writing "Letter From A Birmingham Jail."

But here we are 50 years after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. And I think part of what's happening right now is we are all asking, well, what constitutes progress, you know? If it's been 50 years and we're still discussing these same things, what does it mean to say we can only accept incremental progress?

COLEMAN: Bree Newsome is an artist, filmmaker and human rights activist. Bree, thank you very much.

NEWSOME: Thank you for having me.

(SOUNDBITE OF CORDUROI'S "MY DEAR")

COLEMAN: The Call-In is off next week. But if you have an idea for what you want to hear on the next one, let us know. Call us at 202-216-9217. That's 202-216-9217.

(SOUNDBITE OF CORDUROI'S "MY DEAR")

Copyright © 2018 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio record.

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Martin Luther King Jr.'s Dream 50 Years After His Assassination

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KORVA COLEMAN, HOST: Time now for The Call-In. (SOUNDBITE OF CORDUROI'S "MY DEAR") COLEMAN: Fifty years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tenn. His life has come to symbolize the struggle for freedom, equality and justice. We asked listeners if they see King's dream alive today.

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RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:

In 1968, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. broke away from his work on a Poor People's Campaign to answer a call from Memphis. Activists there needed him to help energize a sanitation workers' strike, a cause for economic justice that would be his last. Tomorrow, the nation marks 50 years since King's assassination. As part of our series about the historic nature of the year 1968, NPR's Debbie Elliott looks back at King's final speech and his time in Memphis.

DEBBIE ELLIOTT, BYLINE: Only one African-American church sanctuary in Memphis was large enough to accommodate the crowd that Martin Luther King drew on April 3, 1968.

CHARLES BLAKE: This is Mason Temple.

ELLIOTT: Mason Temple is home to the Church of God in Christ. Presiding Bishop Charles Blake walks across the red carpet to the pulpit where King preached for the last time.

BLAKE: We felt a kindredness (ph), a relationship with him and with the civil rights movement. And we were overjoyed to open our doors.

(SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH, "I'VE BEEN TO THE MOUNTAINTOP")

MARTIN LUTHER KING JR: Nothing would be more tragic than to stop at this point in Memphis. We got to see it through.

ELLIOTT: "The nation is sick," he said. "Trouble is in the land." King had come to Memphis troubled himself.

XERNONA CLAYTON: He was very depressed.

ELLIOTT: Xernona Clayton was an organizer at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and was a close friend of the King family.

CLAYTON: He just felt like the country was falling apart. I drove him to the airport to go to Memphis. And on the way to the airport, he said to me, you know, I'm realizing now that this country is not ripe for what we're trying to do.

ELLIOTT: There had been race riots in American cities, and the country was divided over the Vietnam War, which King had denounced. Historian Taylor Branch...

TAYLOR BRANCH: The environment in early 1968 is, I would say, one of highly aroused hostility, somewhat like the gridlock of today, but in the midst of war.

ELLIOTT: Branch is executive producer of a new HBO documentary, "King In The Wilderness," that looks at his final years.

BRANCH: Dr. King's frame of mind was pretty battered. He was not front-and-center celebrated the way he had been in Selma. A lot of the national media was totally captivated by Black Power and militancy and kind of projected the attitude that Dr. King was passe.

ELLIOTT: After spending more than a decade trying to dismantle segregation, King had turned his focus to poverty. He was organizing a Poor People's Campaign when Reverend James Lawson asked him to come to Memphis. Sanitation workers were on strike for better working conditions after two garbage collectors were killed on the job. The workers had been marching for weeks, but the strike had not garnered national attention until King came, attention Memphis did not want. King was back in town after leading a public demonstration a week earlier that erupted in a clash with police.

CLAYBORNE CARSON: He was being attacked for the violence in Memphis.

ELLIOTT: History professor Clayborne Carson is director of the Martin Luther King Research and Education Institute at Stanford and editor of King's papers.

CARSON: He knew that if he didn't respond and show that he could have a peaceful march in Memphis, then what were the prospects for his Poor People's Campaign in Washington? You know, there were signs that the country was coming apart on racial lines.

ELLIOTT: On that night, April 3, a spring thunderstorm was dousing Memphis. King was doubtful people would show for the mass meeting at Mason Temple. So at first, he stayed behind at the Lorraine Motel. But the sanctuary was full to the balconies, and the crowd called out to hear from King, according to Fred Davis, a Memphis city councilman at the time.

FRED DAVIS: He came in and sat in a chair for a minute just to catch his breath, and then he approached the podium. He had no notes, nothing. He was in the spirit.

(SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH, "I'VE BEEN TO THE MOUNTAINTOP")

KING JR: We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now because I've been to the mountaintop.

(CHEERING)

JAMES LAWSON: For me, it was one of the zenith experiences of a whole movement.

ELLIOTT: Reverend James Lawson, the local minister who recruited King to Memphis.

LAWSON: It was thundering and lightning outside, and we had a tin roof in part of the Mason Temple, and so the rain was just battering the roof. Nevertheless, there was a sense inside of warmth and unity. We're engaged in a great struggle.

(SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH, "I'VE BEEN TO THE MOUNTAINTOP")

KING JR: I've seen the promised land.

(CHEERING)

KING JR: 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.

(APPLAUSE)

ELLIOTT: The next day, Martin Luther King was assassinated on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. The popular interpretation is that King sensed the end was near before making that seemingly prophetic speech. Historian Taylor Branch says there's another dimension. It was not unusual for King to talk about threats on his life. That final night in Memphis, Branch says, was about keeping the movement alive.

BRANCH: By rescuing nonviolence in Memphis, the people that were there with him that night were helping to restore the potential to show America a way out of the divisions that we had over poverty and war and race in America.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

LYNDON B. JOHNSON: America is shocked and saddened by the brutal slaying tonight of Dr. Martin Luther King. I ask every citizen...

ELLIOTT: Despite President Lyndon Johnson's call for calm that night, riots broke out in Memphis and around the country. Reverend James Lawson says momentum for transforming the country was lost to what he calls the politics of assassination.

LAWSON: That has continued to grieve me. His death, wherever it was going to happen, it happened in Memphis. Wherever it was going to happen, that still grieves me because of what it did to the nation, the loss.

ELLIOTT: Lawson is 89 years old and still teaching nonviolent strategies to young activists. He's not lost hope.

LAWSON: There are a lot of signs that a lot of people want to get back on the track - the women's marches, the DREAMers' marches, the work to dismantle the criminal justice system and the prison system. There's a lot of signs.

ELLIOTT: The future of King's mission is the focus of commemorative events in Memphis this week as organizers pose the question raised in King's last book - where do we go from here? Debbie Elliott, NPR News, Memphis.

(SOUNDBITE OF BEN BRANCH SONG, "PRECIOUS LORD, TAKE MY HAND")

Copyright © 2018 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio record.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Martin Luther King Jr.'s Final Cause: Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST: In 1968, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. broke away from his work on a Poor People's Campaign to answer a call from Memphis. Activists there needed him to help energize a sanitation workers' strike, a cause for economic justice that would be his last.