6. Martin Luther King Jr. deserves the opportunity to pass judgment on the fifty years since his murder and determine whether America has actually moved forwards
An American Baptist minister who rose to become the most visible spokesperson of the Civil Rights Movements, Martin Luther King Jr. remains to this day one of the most respected individuals from modern history. Leading the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 and elected the first president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957, following the failed struggle in 1962 to end segregation in Albany, Georgia, King helped organize the now-famous March on Washington a year later. Delivering his universally acclaimed and celebrated “I Have a Dream” speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, King proclaimed a vision of the future without racial hatred or discrimination.
Winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, recognizing both his activism but also his passionate conviction in nonviolent resistance, in 1965 King was a leading figure in the Selma to Montgomery marches. Planning a national occupation of Washington D.C. in 1968, on April 4 of the same year King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, by James Earl Ray. Posthumously awarded the nation’s highest honor – the Presidential Medal of Freedom – as well as commemorated by a federal holiday and memorial on the National Mall, King deserved the chance to provide an honest assessment of the ongoing struggle for racial equality and whether or not his dream, even now fifty years on, has been realized.
Read More: June 8, 1968: James Earl Ray is Arrested.