Where do we go from here?

“First, the line of progress is never straight. For a period a movement may follow a straight line and then it encounters obstacles and the path bends. It is like curving around a mountain when you are approaching a city. Often if feels as though you were moving backwards, and you lose sight of your goal: but in fact you are moving ahead, and soon you will see the city again, closer by.”

— Martin Luther King Jr., writing in “Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?”

Tuesday marks the 49th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., an event that scarred Memphis and became a coda to a turbulent decade defined by racial unrest, landmark civil rights legislation and the unfulfilled promise of integration.

Throughout the nation, and especially in Memphis, people will reflect on King’s life and mission.

Civil rights leaders including Andrew Young and the Rev. Jesse Jackson came to Memphis on Monday to dedicate a historical marker at Memphis International Airport commemorating King’s final flight. On Tuesday, the National Civil Rights Museum holds its annual ceremony at 6:01 p.m., the exact moment King was shot on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. Young and Jackson were confidantes of King who were with him at the motel the day he was killed.

King’s final fight centered on economic equality and drawing attention to poverty, which then as now was especially acute in Memphis. King flew to Memphis on April 3, 1968, to support a sanitation workers strike. And, of course, King delivered his famous “Mountaintop” speech that night at Mason Temple Church of God in Christ.

Nearly five decades later, his fight for the poor and disenfranchised still carries significance.

“One of the things that resonates for me is the seeming intractability of inequality,” said Charles McKinney, the chair of the Africana studies program at Rhodes College and an associate professor of history.

King’s vision, McKinney notes, was to “create a multiracial coalition that would address systemic inequality.”

It was striking inequality — driven by high rates of poverty, inadequate levels of education and the inability of many African-Americans to get jobs that paid a living wage — that propelled King to take a more strident stance in his last two years.

Jackson recalls the economic struggle then and says there are echoes today, even as he acknowledges “social progress” and many symbols of integration.

“When the walls of segregation came down, it freed up people who could become national leaders,” he said, citing white Southern politicians and, later, some black politicians. Jackson also cites achievements among collegiate and professional athletes, but says such progress has largely eluded AfricanAmericans in the corporate world.

But the next 12 months, culminating next April 4 with the 50th anniversary of King’s death, offer a chance to hit the reset button, or at least to start and sustain meaningful conversations about the inequality issues that persist.