DIVERSITY | Offering a place for everyone
29 December 2008
Epilogue
An assassin ends King’s career, but not the forces King led
This article is excerpted from the book Free At Last: The U.S. Civil Rights Movement, published by the Bureau of International Information Programs. View the entire book (PDF, 3.6 MB).
On March 21, 1965, as civil rights advocates and their supporters gathered in Selma, a local Southern Christian Leadership Conference leader warned the press that the “irresponsibility” of the more militant activists might cause the movement enormous harm. The Reverend Jefferson P. Rogers was referring to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, whose leadership was growing increasingly impatient with the gradualist strategy of Martin Luther King and the mainstream civil rights movement. Nearly every broad-based social movement faces similar tensions, but the years and decades that followed would prove the wisdom of the strategy pursued by Thurgood Marshall, King, and the others. The great triumphs of the civil rights movement were evidence that, in a nation of laws, the key to progress lay in establishing the real legal equality of African Americans — in public facilities, in places of education, and, most of all, at the voting booth.
But this truth was not yet apparent. By May 1966, Stokely Carmichael, veteran of numerous voter registration drives, had established himself as the new head of SNCC. In a speech at Greenwood, Mississippi, Carmichael raised a call for “Black Power.” Where Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King Jr. had sought integration, Carmichael instead sought separation. Integration, he said, was “an insidious subterfuge, for the maintenance of white supremacy.” Meanwhile, the Black Panther Party (some accounts trace the name to a visual emblem for illiterate voters used in an Alabama voter registration drive), founded in Oakland, California, in October 1966 by activists Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, employed armed members — “Panthers” — to shadow police officers whom they believed unfairly targeted blacks. While the party briefly enjoyed a measure of popularity, particularly through its social services programs, armed altercations with local police resulted in the death or jailing of prominent Panthers, turned many Americans against its violent ways, and fragmented the Panther movement. It petered out in a maze of factionalism and mutual recriminations.
The year 1968 was one of political upheaval throughout much of the Western world. In the United States, that year would see the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who as attorney general had provided timely assistance to civil rights activists. And it would see the end of King’s remarkable career.
It was a measure of the civil rights movement’s accomplishments in securing legal equality that King dedicated his last years to fighting for economic equality. On April 3, 1968, he campaigned in Memphis, Tennessee, on behalf of striking — and primarily black — sanitation workers. King’s last address drew strongly on his lifelong study of the Bible. It would prove prophetic:
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.
And I don’t mind.
Like anybody, I would like to live a long life — longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will.
And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain.
And I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the Promised Land.
I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.
And so I’m happy tonight; I’m not worried about anything; I’m not fearing any man.
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.
An assassin’s bullet took King’s life the very next day. He was 39 years old. The medical examiners said he died with the heart of a 60 year old, because King had for so long carried the burden of so many. Some 300,000 Americans attended his funeral.
The murder of Martin Luther King Jr. set off riots in Washington, D.C., and in more than 100 other American cities. At that moment, the short of vision and the faint of heart might have questioned King’s life work. But the Promised Land that King described was in many ways far closer than it seemed on those angry, fire-lit nights of April 1968.
