On April 4, 1968, 50 years ago today, Martin Luther King is murdered in Memphis. On April 8, there was a march in Fredericksburg, 330 processing from Mt. Zion Baptist Church to St. George’s Episcopal where there was a memorial service attended by 500.
Part 2 of a retrospective – "Martin Luther King’s Last Days"
In the months prior to his assassination, Martin Luther King became increasingly concerned with the problem of economic inequality in America. How was the black man was faring economically? King was moving away from his sole focus on desegregation and the King we remember in 1963, 5 years earlier. He would push for Congress to set aside money for a comprehensive antipoverty program and 500,000 units of low cost housing per year.
King spoke that the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) would apply the 1963 lessons of Birmingham to its upcoming economic justice campaign in Washington. "We’ve got to find a method that will disrupt our cities if necessary, create the crisis that will force the nation to look at the situation, dramatize it, and yet at the same time not destroy life or property …. I see that as massive civil disobedience."
He organized a Poor People’s Campaign for Washington to focus on the issue, including an interracial poor people’s march on Washington. King held a press conference to announce SCLC’s plans. "Waves of the nation’s poor and disinherited" would descend upon Washington around April 1, and "will stay until America responds" with "specific reforms, . . . until some definite and positive action is taken to provide jobs and income for the poor."
The planning was not going well, however, and was running behind. In March 1968 traveled to Memphis in support of poorly treated African-American sanitation workers. On March 28, a workers’ protest march led by King ended in violence and the death of an African-American teenager. King left the city but vowed to return in early April to lead another demonstration. King saw Memphis as economic justice for the underpaid sanitation workers and argued that it all tied into the Poor People’s Campaign.
On April 3, back in Memphis, King gave his last speech saying, “We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop…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.” Speech highlights
He spoke of how he often thought about his own death, and about his funeral, and about how he hoped his eulogy would recognize the things he felt were most important about his life: that he "tried to give his life serving others," that he "tried to love somebody," "tried to be right on the war question," "to feed the hungry and, more than anything else, "tried to love and serve humanity. "
King felt besieged on several fronts in his final year. Fundamentally, he had broken with the Johnson administration on Vietnam as well as with much of the liberal establishment over the issue. In a speech on Vietnam in 1967, he said “This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love…. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
Even within the Southern Christian Leadership Conference which he founded in 1957 to help encourage other communities to take up the crusade for civil rights there were factions that opposed him, and it was difficult to holding the group together. Some want to go back to Washington for the Poor People’s Campaign and felt Memphis a waste of time.
“Over the last three months, Doc is in a shakier emotional state than he had ever been before,” said Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Garrow. “It was a combination of exhaustion and the political pessimism.” He expressed a desire to get back to being a simple Baptist preacher again or becoming a college president.
His popularity rating was on a slide. The Gallop Poll noted that in 1966, 63 percent of Americans held a negative view of the civil rights leader, while just 32 percent held a positive one. This was a marked reversal from five years earlier, when 41 percent of Americans gave King a positive rating and 37 percent a negative one.
Fundamentally, he saw that the struggle was broader. The “black revolution” was more than a civil rights movement, he insisted. “It is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws-racism, poverty, militarism and materialism”. In his posthumously published essay, “A Testament of Hope”, he urged African Americans to refrain from violence which had taken his life . Ironically, the cities exploded in riots after King was shot. Congress pushed through the 1968 Civil Rights Act, commonly called the Fair Housing Act. It was the outcome King had fought for, brought about by methods he had condemned. The act criminalized residential segregation and wound up reorganizing city neighborhoods in ways that tempered future unrest. In the end, King was right to broaden his movement.
We are still facing this today but some progress has been made. How has poverty changed in Memphis in the last 50 years? This was his concern. Recently The Poverty Report: Memphis Since MLK has been issued. While poverty rates have fallen, and education attainments in high school and college have increased, median income for African Americans has stubbornly remained at approximately 50% of income for whites for the past half century. Even worse, the incarceration rate for African Americans has increased 50% since 1980 while whites has fallen slightly. The dream deferred.
On another front, the movement was much more successful. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 had a massive impact. In the 15 years after it became law, the number of black elected officials nationwide jumped from 100 to 1,813. Major cities elected their first black mayors, and stronger anti-discrimination laws opened opportunities for black people in business and real estate.