Fifty years ago, James Earl Ray assassinated the twentieth century’s most eloquent voice for peace, justice, and freedom: Martin Luther King Jr. Eerily, the night before, King prophesied his fate. To an audience of striking sanitation workers (garbage collectors) in Memphis, Tennessee, he exclaimed: “I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as people will get to the promised land.” The following day, on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, King became a martyr.
The anniversary of King’s murder gives pause for reflection. The civil rights movement he fronted achieved revolutionary change between 1956 and 1968. When King first protested in Montgomery, Alabama, legalised racism divided the US South. African Americans were denied the right to vote and by-and-large could not share schools, workplaces, neighbourhoods, transport, and all manner of public facilities, with whites. Interracial marriage was illegal. This American apartheid existed in near impregnable form from 1895 to 1954.
Led by King, nonviolent protests in Montgomery, Albany, Birmingham, and Selma, compelled Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Housing Rights Act of 1968. Additionally, the Supreme Court outlawed racially segregated schools and permitted interracial marriage. In little over a decade, legalised racism went from being respectable to disgraceful. African Americans voted for the first time, sat at the front of the bus, and learnt at once forbidden schools.
Yet King did not achieve these things alone. He joined in concert with Rosa Parks in Montgomery, with school children in Birmingham, with John Lewis in Selma, and with unions in Memphis. Every step required marching in numbers to defy authorities and to enforce economic boycotts against racist businesses. Since reason, righteousness, and the power of one were often not enough, the movement used mass nonviolent pressure to force change.
King searched for the Promised Land in unlikely places. He went to Memphis not only to help the sanitation workers but also to drum up support for a new march on Washington: the Poor People’s Campaign. He hoped the march would bring an interracial coalition of the poor, dispossessed, and disaffected to the US capital to demand a better deal from the political elite. Yet, he died before the campaign could come to fruition and much of his dream has since remained unfulfilled.
It is worth using this anniversary to reflect on how King would view our world today. We cannot know precisely his view on every contemporary issue, however, we can reasonably speculate. In King’s final months, he persistently denounced a triplet of evils: materialism, militarism, and racism.
Today, he would deplore the fact that 43 million Americans live in poverty while multi-billionaires run the US government. He would be deeply concerned about tax cuts that will allow US corporations to evade their civic responsibilities and he would be appalled at the massive concentration of wealth in the northern hemisphere. He would tell us that a house is first and foremost a home, not an investment property.
King would be repelled by the nuclear gamesmanship of Donald Trump, Kim Jong-un, and Vladimir Putin. Two months before he died, King warned of a drift toward nuclear war. The cause? Nations, especially his own he said, believed: “I must be first. I must be supreme. Our nation must rule the world.” Sound familiar? On his final night on earth, with his last but a few eloquent words, King warned: “It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it’s nonviolence or nonexistence.” Given his nonviolent creed and that he was a victim of gun violence himself, he would be on the front line today with millions of teenagers furious at the intransigence of Congress and the NRA in relation to sensible gun control. King knew that dead children are not free.
And despite progress since 1968, such as the election of the first African American president, the backsliding on racial equality would alarm King. Trump’s racism and the Alt-right would appal, as too would the implicit racism of the Brexit campaign’s anti-refugee stance. He would see that although capital is free to travel easily across borders, labour is not so free. King would notice that economic injustice forces people to flee homelands as refuges and that cruel laws imprison them in insufferable and indefinite detention. He would notice that this fate befalls people of colour more than whites and would not split hairs over whether someone is a war refugee or a so-called economic refugee; his compassion would extend to both.
King described a house that we might find if we made it to the Promised Land: the World House. In the house, we would “have to live together – black and white, Easterner and Westerner, Gentile and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, Moslem and Hindu.” He preached that “because we can never again live apart”, we “must learn somehow to live with each other in peace.”
A peaceful world characterised by racial and economic equality and religious tolerance sounds idealistic. However, King was an idealist and in a mere 12 years went an enormous distance towards the Promised Land and forging a just world. He brought people together instead of dividing them and if our global leaders do not heed his example, we must.