On the evening of April 4, 1968, while standing on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was to lead a protest march in sympathy with striking garbage workers of that city, he was assassinated.
—From Dr. King’s Nobel Peace Prize Biography
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Despite all this opportunistic posturing, Dr. King did not enjoy such an uncontroversial status while alive. In fact, he was imprisoned, hounded by the FBI and vilified by some as a traitor to the United States. Notably, and seemingly contradictorily, he was also the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 for his “faith in the unarmed struggle” and his civil rights efforts.
Dr. King was an anti-racist leader in a time when the civil rights struggles, led in part by the Black church, were beginning to intermingle with the nascent struggle against the war in Vietnam. Although the working class played a pivotal role in those struggles as well, it never achieved political hegemony over the various political currents. Consequently, Dr. King embodies much of the brilliance and daring as well as the political limitations of the era in which he lived and which he helped to forge.
Dr. King first came to national prominence through his leadership in the Montgomery Bus Boycott that challenged the Jim Crow laws of the South. He then went on to become one of the founders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In the latter days of his life, Dr. King became an outspoken critic of the occupation and colonization of Vietnam by the U.S. government, which he then indicted as the “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”
Despite admonitions from his friends telling him to stick to the relatively politically safe arena of civil rights, Dr. King began to link the struggles against racial inequalities with economic disparities and the anti-war movement. Therein lies Dr. King’s true legacy; his more mature understanding that an “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
