The man who had a dream
Martin Luther King was assassinated 50 years ago today but before being hit by the gunman’s bullet, the civil rights leader was hounded by the FBI, stabbed and saw his home firebombed
In Los Angeles
AN ASSASSIN’S bullet ended the life of Martin Luther King Junior on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, 50 years ago today – but it could not vanquish his dream.
The 39-year-old Baptist minister whose non-violent protests energised America’s civil rights movement for a turbulent decade has continued to inspire the nation.
“I have a dream,” he declared in 1963, “that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.”
In pursuit of this aim King led a bus boycott protesting segregation in Montgomery, Alabama and was the keynote speaker at the 1963 March On Washington which saw hundreds of thousands descend on the nation’s capital demanding an end to racial injustice.
His efforts helped pass the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and he became the youngest Nobel Peace Prize laureate for his success in changing hearts and minds with words not bullets.
Yet King endured years of torment and violence from racist opponents who feared that he was threatening their way of life.
His family’s home was firebombed in 1956 when he was a 26-year-old pastor leading the bus boycott sparked by the refusal of local activist Rosa Parks to give up her seat for a white passenger.
That night he stood amid the wreckage of his home and pleaded with an angry black crowd armed with guns and knives not to respond with violence. “We must meet hate with love,” he told the mob.
Days later 12 sticks of dynamite were found on King’s porch and that December a shotgun blast was fired into his home.
Two years later the preacher was in Blumstein’s department store in Harlem, New York, signing copies of his book about the bus strike, Stride Toward Freedom, when a mentally-disturbed African-American woman, Izola Curry, 42, approached.
“I’ve been looking for you for five years,” she said, plunging a 7in knife deep into his chest. Surgeons found the blade resting on King’s aorta – a mere sneeze could have killed him.
The Ku Klux Klan burned crosses on his lawn after he moved to Atlanta in 1960 and he endured repeated death threats, bomb scares, and menacing latenight phone calls.
KING was also hounded by J Edgar Hoover’s FBI, which eavesdropped on his office, home, hotel rooms and phones. An FBI memo in 1963 described King as “the most dangerous and effective negro leader in the country”.
Hidden mics captured King’s extra-marital affairs and a 1968 FBI report alleged: “Throughout the ensuing years and until this date King has continued to carry on his sexual aberrations secretly while holding himself out to public view as a moral leader of religious conviction.”
The man who went on to change the face of America was born in Atlanta, Georgia, on January 15, 1929, and christened Michael after his father, a Baptist pastor who changed his name and that of his son to Martin after a trip to Germany left him with an abiding respect for the 16th-century Protestant Reformation leader Martin Luther. SIMPLE SALUTE: King’s coffin – on a farm cart pulled by mules – on its last journey in Atlanta on April 9 1968. Racist James Earl Ray, right, was his killer King attended Morehouse College in Atlanta and then a theological seminary in Pennsylvania, earning his doctorate in 1955.
Returning to the South with his wife, Coretta Scott King, he became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery. When Rosa Parks was arrested in 1955 King mobilised the black community in a 382day boycott of the city buses.
By the time the US Supreme Court declared bus segregation illegal King had become a national figure in the civil rights movement.
His “I have a dream” speech at the March On Washington galvanised black America. “I have a dream,” he said, “that one day this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed – ‘We hold these truths to be selfevident, that all men are created equal’.”
On April 4, 1968 King was in Memphis to support a sanitation workers’ strike.
In his final speech, delivered the night before his death, he mused on his mortality, acknowledging: “I’ve been to the mountaintop… I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the Promised Land.”
After King’s slaying riots broke out across America. Washington DC exploded in four days of violence that left 13 dead and 800 fires burning.
A bullet fired by racist loser James Earl Ray may have ended King’s life but his legacy has endured. President Lyndon B Johnson enacted legislation barring racial discrimination, blacks won widespread political representation and – 40 years after King’s death – Barack Obama was elected to the White House.
King was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, hundreds of streets were named after him and a 30ft statue was installed on Washington DC’s National Mall.
But perhaps the biggest measure of his achievement was when a Republican president, Ronald Reagan, created a federal holiday in his name – the only American apart from George Washington to be granted such an honour.