“I’ve been to the mountaintop,” Martin Luther King, Jr. declaimed in Memphis on April 3, 1968. The day before he fell to an assassin’s bullet, King anticipated death with triumphant oratory. He thereby set for his legacy the tone that has ever after prevailed. The assassin was reduced to the role of a bit player in a grand drama with the power to move the entire world.

Fifty years on, we must pause to reflect on that drama. For there is a continuing story to tell, one from which we may profit now as surely as the U.S. did 50 years ago.