Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, 50 years ago on April 4, 1968, setting off a period of mourning, reflection and anger that gripped America. He was in Memphis to rally support for striking sanitation workers, who were protesting unsafe working conditions, and while on the balcony of his room at the Lorraine Motel (now the site of the National Civil Rights Museum), he was shot once and fatally by James Earl Ray, from the bathroom of a nearby boarding house.
By the age of 39, King had become a primary leader of the civil rights movement and had been active since the 1950s as a minister and founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He was an instrumental figure in protests (in Montgomery, Washington, Selma and elsewhere) and in the passage of landmark civil and voting rights legislation. He had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize at 35. In the last years of his life, King faced criticism from some African-American activists who wanted him to employ more confrontational strategies for change. At the same time, he had become more outspoken on issues of poverty and the need to end the war in Vietnam, significantly in the "Riverside Church" speech, delivered in New York a year to the day before his death.
Jesse Jackson: Losing MLK hurts all the time, but we fight on
The assassination reverberated powerfully around the world, especially in American cities, where the tragedy sparked unrest in Washington, Chicago, Baltimore, Kansas City, Missouri, and elsewhere. The following week, riots broke out in dozens of cities, in multiple instances warranting the intervention of the National Guard.
King s death (like that of Malcolm X only a few years earlier) radicalized some activists who saw futility in his strategy of nonviolence. At the same time, widespread public mourning for King was key in the passage -- only days after his assassination -- of the Fair Housing Act, the final significant civil rights legislation of the era. President Ronald Reagan signed into law a bill creating a national holiday in King s name in 1983, and King s vision remains the foundational lexicon of the fight for racial equality in the United States.
On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of his assassination, CNN Opinion asked a diverse group of activists, academics, public figures and artists: What do you see as the most applicable part of King s legacy? On this occasion, what do you most want to say about him?
The views expressed here are solely those of the authors.
King s place in history is still unfolding
Sherrilyn Ifill: King s work remains unfinished, but the democracy-building work continues
A decade before his shocking assassination, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on behalf of the Montgomery Improvement Association, sent a thoughtful letter and a $1,000 check to Thurgood Marshall, then director-counsel and founder of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF), the civil-rights organization I m now blessed to lead.
King wrote that the purpose of the letter and the modest contribution — which he wished wasn t so modest, perhaps because he knew the real costs of legal representation in the trenches — was to express his "deep sense of gratitude" for our work "for not only the Negro in particular but American Democracy in general."
"You continue winning the legal victories for us and we will work passionately and unrelentingly to implement these victories on the local level through non-violent means," King wrote, singling out our legal assistance in his organization s struggle to help desegregate the Montgomery bus system.
This was no ordinary civic-legal partnership. If Brown v. Board Education spelled the doom of "separate but equal," the lesser known Browder v. Gayle, which we helped litigate in Alabama just two years later, was the doctrine s coup de grâce — a unanimous Supreme Court declined to disturb a lower-court ruling invalidating a series of Jim Crow-era statutes and ordinances that provided for racially segregated buses.
What s most touching to me about King s letter to the LDF is that it came in response to legal victories that were, as he put it, victories for "American Democracy." The rulings were a recognition, at long last, that the Fourteenth Amendment meant what it said when it was ratified in 1868. That the Constitution s promise of equality — the command that no state could "deny to any person ... the equal protection of the laws" — was meant for all of us, regardless of skin color. That exclusion of anyone on account of race could not be tolerated.
And yet, we re still fighting to make our Constitution s true meaning real. We re still fighting to make sure no one s vote is suppressed. We re still suing to ensure that the Fair Housing Act, a law enacted in the very wake of King s death, is enforced to its fullest extent. We re still fighting school districts that believe a segregated education is in children s best interests. We re still fighting so that police departments that brutalize communities of color are held to basic principles of constitutional policing. We re still fighting so that immigrants aren t targeted for expulsion from this country.
MLK assassination 50 years later
Worse yet, when it is the president of the United States himself who is pushing an unconstitutional vision of America — by casting this struggle for basic dignity and equality as a political tool to denigrate black and brown people, all the while stoking white resentment and victimizing himself — it is clear that we re far from living up to King s ideals.
Today, 50 years since his death in Memphis, we re in a moment. A moment when I truly believe we are being driven to confront that rot at the foundation of our democracy. A rot we have papered over for too long. It is weakening every pillar of our democracy — up to and including the highest office in our land.
Just a month before King s death in 1968, Jack Greenberg, our second director-counsel after Marshall, met with Dr. King to discuss our next partnership: our representation of participants in the Poor People s Campaign to advocate for fair wages, better jobs, employment training and more — the next logical step in King s vision of true equality. That he was killed while leading such an effort among striking sanitation workers in Memphis is a tragic testament to what was destined to be the next phase of his legacy.
But to this day, I m heartened as I look back on that civic-legal bond we shared, and his insight that our connection was "the most powerful and constructive avenue" to bring African Americans to their full measure as citizens. That much is still true today, or else we would ve given up the fight a long time ago.
King s work remains unfinished, but the democracy-building work continues — with lawyers and activists working hand in hand to reach the promised land that King saw but couldn t yet enter.
