Martin Luther King

Martin Luther King in Memphis supporting Black sanitation workersMartin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968. Most people don't know much about the context - what projects was King working on at the time, and why was King in Memphis? It is important to tell this story, to understand what King was doing and talking about in the last couple years of his life to get a better understanding of the increasing threat he posed to the system and why he was assassinated.

1967 and 1968 were years of incredible upheaval around the world. Liberation movements in the Third World and radical and revolutionary movements in the First World had a tremendous upsurge. Within the U.S., the non-violent ideology of the main civil rights organizations of the 50s and early 60s was giving way to new conceptions of Black power and Black Liberation. Malcolm X put the struggle of Black people in the U.S. in a global context before he was assassinated in 1965 -- making links with the revolutionary national liberation movements rocking Asia, Africa and Latin America at the time. The Black Panther Party was formed in 1966 and spread around the country in 67-68 as an explicitly revolutionary and socialist Black organization. Local rebellions in Black urban neighborhoods began in these years, which then spread to the entire country and became massive in the days after Martin Luther King was assassinated. The anti-war movement in the U.S. was becoming a mass phenomenon, and a growing anti-imperialist section of the movement began to actively support the revolutionaries in Vietnam.

It was in this context that we have to consider Martin Luther King's ideas and actions in 1967-68. He was being pushed to the left by the surging revolutionary movements around the world, and the rising revolutionary sentiment and organization in the Black community.

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