Forty years later, there are schools named in his honor, and streets, and public buildings. He has a national holiday to commemorate his birthday and an iconic status throughout the world. He was once the most admired personality in the world, and even 40
By the time of his death, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was speaking not of racial peace, but of righting wrongs and rooting out injustice, wherever it reared its ugly head.
He had begun to criticize America’s involvement in the Vietnam War and was calling on the government to end that unjust war, which was disproportionately claiming minority lives, and the cost of the war, which was disproportionately leaving too many programs to aid the underprivileged unfunded.
As we pause to reflect upon his death, we also have to reflect upon his legacy. He did not go to Memphis to argue for the right to drink at segregated soda fountains. He did not go there to protest the war.
He went for a rather simple reason, to argue for the rights of 1,300 Black sanitation workers, who had began a strike for job safety, better wages and benefits and union recognition. But for all of his many accomplishments, King is also remembered, 40 years after his death by assassination, for the terrible riots that shook the nation’s cities from the North, to the South, from the Atlantic Coast to the Pacific Coast.
Those civic insurrections caused billions of dollars in damage and cost dozens of lives. They were sparked by the untimely death of a man who had come to embody the civil rights movement, and whose voice had become the voice of the downtrodden, not only those who were Black, but of every hue.
Unfortunately, the evidence of those riots threatens to overshadow Dr. King’s legacy. As neighborhoods that were laid to waste by the riots continue to exist only as barren stretches of empty, garbage and weed-infested lots, it is clear that the riots were the complete opposite of Dr. King’s dream.
The anger that spilled over into the streets and prompted violence and looting and vandalismà and death, was exactly what Dr. King preached against, what he lived his life to end. That men of peace are usually felled by violence is an irony that was not lost on Dr. King. He foretold his death in his final speech at Mason Temple in Memphis, noting that he had “been to the mountaintop, and I’ve seen the promised land.”
Then he eerily added, “I might not get there with youà .” Forty years later, we should consider his promise, and our lack of progress, and vow, “never again.”
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