Public Employee Press: PEP Talk
Martin Luther King, Jr. — His Civil Rights legacy
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s formidable activism bent the moral arc of our nation towards becoming a more just and inclusive society. He hoped for the day when love and justice would cure the plague of racism and hate, and his “four young children”— and all individuals — “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
This year Dr. King would have turned 93 on January 15. On the 54th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination on April 4, 1968, we reflect on his life and legacy: the peaceful pursuit of liberty, justice, and equality, and service to others.
As a young minister Dr. King and his wife, Coretta Scott King, along with organizers Bayard Rustin, A. Philip Randolph, Southern Christian Leadership Conference members and others, dedicated their lives to the fight for freedom and civil rights.
“Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability but comes through continuous struggle,” Dr. King said.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision signaled the beginning of an end to racial segregation in public schools. It also ignited one of the greatest periods of change in the United States, the Civil Rights Movement.
In the summer of 1955, young Emmett Till, 14, was kidnapped and brutally murdered for allegedly insulting a White woman in Mississippi. His mother, Mamie Till Mobley, insisted on showing Emmett’s mutilated corpse in an open-casket funeral. The horrifying events brought national attention to the racial violence and injustice so prevalent in Mississippi, though not limited to the South.
The lynching galvanized Black people and thrust into the forefront a young preacher from Atlanta, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Till’s murder, he said, exemplified “the evil of racial injustice.”
Dr. King led the Montgomery Bus Boycott in Dec. ‘55, after Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat. The yearlong economic protest required great sacrifice, but led to desegregated intrastate travel on public transportation.
Decades of sacrifice and struggle ensued as Dr. King and SCLC leaders, the NAACP and others fought for equal rights for Black people. They organized sit-ins at Whites-only lunch counters, picketed department stores and on college campuses. Nonviolent protests were met by hostile mobs of segregationists egged on by racist Birmingham Commissioner Theophilus “Bull” Connor, who turned fire hoses and police dogs on Black children and protesters.
Holding to the nonviolent tenets that eventually won him a Nobel Prize, Dr. King said, “We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence.”
Actors Harry Belafonte and Sidney Portier were Dr. King’s greatest supporters and they contributed huge sums to help finance the Civil Rights Movement. Hollywood A-listers Lena Horne, Rita Moreno, Marlon Brando, Charlton Heston, Sammy Davis Jr., writer James Baldwin, and others, risked their careers when they sided with Dr. King’s cause.
A clarion call drew more than 250,000 people to the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Dr. King delivered his now famous ‘I Have a Dream’ speech before the Lincoln Memorial. There, Dr. King proposed an opportunity for America to reconcile with its past and live up to the promises in the U.S. Constitution.
Three weeks after the historic march, the euphoria that buoyed the movement shattered when white supremacists bombed Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church and killed four little Black girls who were attending Sunday school that morning. Undeterred, Dr. King held fast to his mission.
Working in tandem, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had sent busloads of young activists to the South to register Black voters. In June 1964, three young volunteers, New Yorkers Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney of Mississippi, disappeared.
In August, the three were found buried 14-feet deep near a Mississippi dam. Their murders were meant to silence and intimidate agitators, to create a permafrost, as it were, on the grassroots Freedom Summer voter registration drive.
“Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable. Even a superficial look at history reveals that no social advance rolls in on the wheels of inevitability.
Every step towards the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.”
Despite threats and violence, civil rights leaders kept the pressure on. A major victory for Dr. King, and all Americans, came in 1964 as President Lyndon B. Johnson enacted the Civil Rights Act.
Although the 1957 Civil Rights Act made it a federal crime to suppress another’s right to vote, African Americans in the Jim Crow South were denied the basic right to vote.
For this reason, in 1965, Dr. King went to Selma, Alabama, and held three marches. Joined by a young John Lewis and hundreds more, they walked 54 miles toward Montgomery. At the Edmund Pettus Bridge, police beat them bloody and jailed them. Five months after the Bloody Sunday incident, Johnson signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act that prevented the use of literacy tests as a voting requirement.
Dr. King shone light on the humanity and dignity of workers. Dr. King said, “No work was insignificant.”
He embraced Cesar Chavez’s efforts to organize farm workers in the United States. In a 1966 telegram, King’s message to Chavez read: “Our separate struggles are really one — a struggle for freedom, for dignity and for humanity.”
By 1967, Dr. King expanded his cause to include the plight of poor whites and anti-war demonstrations. He began planning the Poor People’s Campaign to fight for jobs and a $2 minimum hourly wage (about $15 in today’s money). Racism and poverty are not permanent, he said, but are reversible conditions that require dialogue, consensus and the will to change.
A friend to the labor movement, Dr. King embraced labor’s cause as a microcosm of the struggles his upcoming Poor People’s Campaign would amplify. He said, “Organized labor is a principal force to transform misery and despair into hope and progress.”
AFSCME, the American Federation of State Municipal and County Employees, invited Dr. King to support 1,300 Black sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee, fighting for fair wages, safe working conditions, and the right to belong to a union.
Organizer T.O. Jones, AFSCME’s Bill Lucy, and others, helped Memphis workers craft the now famous campaign slogan: I AM A MAN, a demand for the city of Memphis to recognize and respect them.
“You are reminding not only Memphis, but you are reminding the nation that it is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages,” Dr. King said. He connected the struggle for civil rights with labor rights and economic justice. He opposed so-called “right-to-work” laws that make it difficult for workers to organize.
On the stormy night of April 3, 1968, Dr. King delivered his final oratory, ‘I Have Been to the Mountain Top’. Dr. King reminded the Mason Temple crowd to stay the course, that sacrifice and perseverance won victories in Birmingham and will bring victory to Memphis. To reach the goal of justice, he said, requires passionate concern, tireless dedication, persistence and sacrifice. At 39, Dr. King made the ultimate sacrifice.
