Forty years ago today, much of America was burning.

In the days after an assassin’s bullet cut down Martin Luther King Jr. on the balcony of a Memphis motel, riots broke out in cities across America.

Many black Americans saw the loss of King as a loss of hope for the civil rights movement he so eloquently spearheaded.

In Detroit, Newark, Pittsburgh, Chicago, St. Louis, Cleveland, Oakland, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., in cities across the nation, the pent-up frustration and resentment King had worked so hard to turn into nonviolent activism bubbled over. Store windows were smashed, cars turned over, fires set. People died, a dozen in Washington alone.

It’s not what he would have wanted. The violence would have sickened him, the senseless loss of life, the destruction of property, some of it owned by black businessmen.

One city that did not erupt in flames in the wake of Martin’s death was Indianapolis, thanks largely to the efforts of Robert F. Kennedy, who would himself fall victim to an assassin later in 1968. He learned of King’s death shortly before his scheduled appearance before a largely black crowd, and it was RFK who broke the news of King’s death.

As the crowd gasped and sobs were heard, Kennedy acknowledged the anger the news would foster, recalling his own reaction to the assassination of his brother in 1963 in Dallas.

He told the crowd they could be filled with “bitterness and with hatred and a desire for revenge.

“Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did,” he continued, “to understand and to comprehend and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand, compassion and love.”

Fast forward to today. Friday, the nation remembered the killing of Martin Luther King. In early June, we will do the same on the 40th anniversary of Robert Kennedy’s killing.

In his 1963 speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, delivered less than three months before John F. Kennedy was assassinated, King spoke of his dream for a world in which people no longer were judged by “the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

We’re not there yet, but we’re closer. A black man is contending for the White House. A black man has been secretary of state, a position presently held by a black woman. Blacks are governors, senators, representatives and heads of large corporations.

Great strides have been made, but we’ve far to go before Martin’s dream is realized. King was in Memphis that April to support striking sanitation workers, most of whom were black, in their fight for higher wages. His focus at that time was erasing the economic disparity that then existed in the nation between black and white.

Also in the “I Have a Dream” speech, King said, “One hundred years later the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.”

Not much, it seems, has changed. In 2006, the U.S. Census Bureau reported black household income was 61 percent of white household income. At that time, more than 24 percent of black households were below the poverty line.

This continuing economic disparity must be addressed, if King’s dream is to ever be realized.

There are some two million in prison in the United States, roughly half of whom are black, despite the fact blacks constitute only 13 percent of the population. Fully one-tenth of all black men between the ages of 20 and 35 are behind bars.

This, too, must change.

Whoever the next president is, he or she must begin dealing with the pressing economic and social issues that continue to divide this nation as surely, if not as obviously, as the old Jim Crow segregation laws.



Mullin is senior writer of the News & Eagle.