Find out what Kevin K Gaines believes we don’t discuss enough about the Civil Rights leaders’ mission and how his message has been misrepresented
Martin Luther King Jr rose to prominence thanks to his powerful oratory skills, depicting a future for America that was cooperative and fair for all citizens. In 1955 he became head of the Montgomery Improvement Association to lead protests over the arrest of Rosa Parks. In the years that followed he founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the hopes of uniting the movement for social change.
In 1963 he gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in front of the Lincoln Memorial. The following year King would become the youngest man to win the Nobel Peace Prize and President Johnson would pass the Civil Rights Act. He was shot and killed in 1968 at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis Tennessee before an event he was going to attend. He was 39 years old.

We spoke with inaugural Julian Bond Professor of Civil Rights and Social Justice and a professor of African American history at the University of Virginia, Kevin K Baines, to get his thoughts on the legacy of King and what we should remember about his activism.
“After King’s assassination in 1968, King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, and civil rights activists campaigned to make King’s birthday a national holiday,” Baines explains. “President Ronald Reagan, who had initially opposed the holiday, relented, signing the bill into law in 1983. Those who spent years campaigning for the bill celebrated. But conservatives opposed to civil rights may have had the last laugh.
“Conservatives soon distorted the legacy of the martyred civil rights leader. Emphasising King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, conservatives usurped King’s ideal of a colour-blind society to delegitimise enforcement of race-conscious, civil rights remedies. At the same time, conservatives were loathe to acknowledge King’s radical advocacy for economic justice for poor people, and his opposition to the costly and immoral US war in Vietnam.”
“Conservatives soon distorted the legacy of the martyred civil rights leader”
As well as opposition to the war, King had also started his anti-poverty ‘Poor People’s Campaign’. “Had he lived King would have continued to pursue his revolutionary agenda for economic justice for all poor people, regardless of race. King had become a pariah to US officials when he declared his anti-war position, and called for a radical restructuring of US society. King never wavered in his commitment to nonviolence as younger militants were recklessly calling for armed struggle. Unlike the militants, King was threatening to the establishment because he combined his moral and rhetorical clarity about society’s ills with a truly radical agenda for racial and economic justice.”
[Interview originally published in All About History 74]
Banner image credit: Public Domain/U.S. National Archives and Records Administration