Fifty years ago this evening, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. His struggle for civil rights had already made history by that time. But his murder by a white supremacist career criminal became a defining moment for modern America because it highlighted just how important his work was.
Since then, the nation has changed dramatically, and with respect to race relations, mostly for the better. The clearest evidence of this is that no one under the age of 50 today can fathom the society King was working to change. They are puzzled that anyone could have felt and expressed such open hatred and contempt for their fellow man just on the basis of his skin color.
Today’s young people, and many of the not-so-young, can hardly believe that, through the childhood of their own parents or grandparents, millions of citizens simply accepted contempt and government-enforced segregation as immutable parts of life. They can hardly believe that, just a few decades before they were themselves born, police and onlookers engaged in the Rebel Yell as obviously peaceful marchers were tear-gassed and beaten at Selma.
America remains imperfect, but our last 50 years contradict those who argue that we still live in anything like the Jim Crow era. Nothing today compares to the lawlessness, terrorism — King’s house was bombed in 1956 — and lynching that was routinely visited half a century ago on black people who merely tried to exercise their rights to vote, engage in commerce, or move freely.
As evidence of how much the nation has changed, it elected a black president ten years ago with the largest popular vote in history. It then re-elected him. And to demonstrate that he wasn’t chosen reluctantly or from blind partisanship, he won with millions of votes from people who later went on to support his astoundingly dissimilar Republican successor, President Trump.
No longer are there areas of life or positions of authority and trust off-limits to anyone based on race. African Americans have now chaired both major political parties, both of which are committed to equal rights irrespective of race. They have headed or head 12 of the 15 federal cabinet departments. Two have sat on the Supreme Court. The executive editor of the New York Times and the anchor of America’s most-watched nightly news show are black men.
Racist ideology has been so effectively stigmatized that few dare practice it openly — and that’s a good thing. The Charlottesville Nazis, having had their 15 minutes of fame, have hardly shown their faces since their hate-fest last year.
It’s also a positive development that most people understand why President Barack Obama’s shameful friendly meeting ten years ago with Louis Farrakhan, a vicious racist and anti-Semite, was covered up. The need to conceal it is a testament to King’s legacy as well.
In King’s day, news cameras awakened the nation to the violent abuse Southern authorities were inflicting on peaceful protesters in places like Selma and Birmingham. The vices of King’s enemies made the nation recognize the legitimacy and urgency of his cause. Again today, thanks to the ubiquitous cellphone camera, another massive national awakening is taking place about indefensible police killings of black men such as Philando Castile, Eric Garner, and Walter Scott. Aside from a few fringe elements that view the very existence of police as the real problem, everyone is on the same page and wants to figure out what reforms can prevent this from happening again.
This issue was familiar to King, who declared that, “We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality.”
America has mostly become a better place on race, but it has also changed in some ways for the worse after King’s murder. The absence of his Christian voice of reason and nonviolence was felt acutely as more radical and even violent voices grew louder. But King understood on the one hand how to demand all of his rights without giving an inch, and on the other how “not [to] allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence,” as he put it in his most famous speech on the Washington Mall.
King also cautioned against a vengeful “distrust of all white people” in exchange for a century of rights unjustly denied after the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment. Instead, he argued that whites would come around, as many already had, recognizing “that their destiny is tied up with our destiny, and they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom.”
King’s life should remind everyone who loves the Constitution that all the freedoms it outlines and the rule of law itself depend on that inextricable bind — on the civil rights of every person being respected. As King put it, “We cannot walk alone.”
