Apr 1, 2018 4 min read

For all the turbulence of American social and political life right now, it still doesn’t quite touch the tumult of 1968, the year that brought us the My Lai massacre, riots outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and the sudden abdication of Lyndon Johnson, mired in disapproval ratings just three years after securing the largest popular-vote win in the history of the presidency until then.

Perhaps the two most shattering events in that “annus horribilis” were the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. King was just 39 and Kennedy 42, and when you consider the years of leadership they could have provided, it makes their premature departures all the more heartbreaking.

When King was assassinated April 4, 1968, 50 years ago this Wednesday, he was supporting striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tenn. Though now he is almost universally revered, with a national holiday and a memorial on the National Mall in his honor, at the time of his death, he was at a crossroads. Despite leading a movement that helped secure civil and voting rights for African-Americans, and having won a Nobel Peace Prize, King felt bone-deep weariness. He had been on the national stage since the bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala., 12 years before. Along with continued hostility from white racists in the South and, yes, the North, he was also being denounced by younger activists who advocated a more militant, confrontational approach than King’s Gandhi-style nonviolence.

King was also looking to broaden his mandate and take on economic inequality and the Vietnam War. Though Americans were growing increasingly disenchanted with the conflict, it still had sizable support, and wading into that morass was hardly the safest stand for a public figure to take.

In his lifetime, in fact, King was only on Gallup’s yearly list of the 10 most-admired men on a couple of occasions, and never rising higher than No. 4 in 1964. George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama, made it onto the list in the year before King died, along with an all-white contingent that included Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Billy Graham and Pope Paul VI.

It is a reflection of how far we’ve come over the last half-century that King is now held as one of the most esteemed figures of the 20th century. Here in the 21st century, we can all take lessons from King’s courage and his standing up for principle. And while there can be no doubt King helped blaze the trail that brought us President Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey and Denzel Washington, he would have seen much left undone if he had lived to 2018. Among other things, African-Americans are more than twice as likely to live in poverty than non-Hispanic whites, and 11 percent of African-Americans live in households that make less than 50 percent of the federal poverty level of $12,140 for individuals and $20,780 for a family of three. African-Americans are more likely to be brutalized by police, as the Black Lives Matter movement has made clear, and they are more likely to be incarcerated.

Hate crimes have also been on the rise in the United States over the last couple of years. White supremacists have become emboldened and targeted African-Americans, as well as Jews, Muslims and LGBTQ people. But we can take comfort in the fact that, by and large, we have become a more tolerant people over time, and there’s plenty of reason to believe this trend will continue. Younger Americans have largely shown themselves to be more comfortable with the country’s increasing diversity than their forebears.

That’s a development that would have made King proud.