He fought for racial equality and voting rights, for fair wages and the reproductive rights of women. And in doing so, Martin Luther King Jr. became one of the pioneers of the American model of nonviolent protesting that’s practiced to this day. On the 50th anniversary of his assassination, POLITICO takes a look at how Americans emulate him, consciously or not, in today’s political movements.
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gives a young protester a pat on the back as a group pickets against segregation in St. Augustine, Fla., on June 10, 1964. “This is the ultimate tragedy of segregation,” King said in an address to the National Council of Churches in 1957. “It not only harms one physically, but it injures one spiritually. It scars the soul and distorts the personality. It inflicts the segregator with a false sense of superiority, while inflicting the segregated with a false sense of inferiority.”
Jayceon Hurtz, 2, holds a sign as Black Lives Matter protesters rally March 28, 2018, in response to the police shooting of Stephon Clark in Sacramento, Calif. Clark, an unarmed black man, was shot and killed by police March 18 while in his grandmother’s backyard.
Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images
A woman attends the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on Aug. 28, 1963. King fought for fair wages and working conditions, and in his last year of life poured his heart into the Poor People’s Campaign; he was killed in Memphis while supporting striking sanitation workers. “Let us march on poverty until no American parent has to skip a meal so that their children may eat,” King said in 1965. “March on poverty until no starved man walks the streets of our cities and towns in search of jobs that do not exist.”
Fast food workers and union members carry signs as they stage a protest outside a McDonald’s in Oakland, Calif., on Feb. 12, 2018. The protesters were demanding a $15-an-hour minimum wage on the 50th anniversary of the start of the historic Memphis Sanitation Strike that was led by King.
A crowd gathers in Times Square on April 4, 1969, to pay tribute to King on the one-year anniversary of his assassination. A poster of King reads, “Nonviolence … our most potent weapon.” King’s commitment to nonviolent resistance is one of his greatest legacies. “We will match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering,” King said in a Lenten sermon in Detroit in 1961. “We will meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will, and we will still love you. … We will wear you down by our capacity to suffer.”
Yolanda Renee King (left), granddaughter of Martin Luther King Jr., is accompanied by Jaclyn Corin, a student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., during the March for Our Lives rally in support of gun control March 24, 2018. “My grandfather had a dream that his four little children would not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character,” the 9-year-old said. “I have a dream that enough is enough, and that this should be a gun-free world. Period.”
Voting rights demonstrators join King in walking over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., in early March 1965. “Let us march on ballot boxes, march on ballot boxes until race-baiters disappear from the political arena,” King said at the conclusion of the 54-mile voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery later that month. “Let us march on ballot boxes until the salient misdeeds of bloodthirsty mobs will be transformed into the calculated good deeds of orderly citizens.”
Voting rights activists gather during a rally in front of the U.S. Supreme Court on Jan. 10, 2018, to oppose voter roll purges. The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a challenge to Ohio’s policy of purging infrequent voters from registration rolls, which some say disenfranchises thousands of people.
Dr. Benjamin Spock and King lead nearly 5,000 marchers through the Chicago Loop in protest of U.S. policy in Vietnam, a movement King joined later in life. “It is not enough to say, ‘We must not wage war,’” King said at an anti-war conference in Los Angeles in 1967. “It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it. We must concentrate not merely on the negative expulsion of war, but the positive affirmation of peace.”
Protesters gather in Miami on Aug. 14, 2017, to demonstrate against what they call President Donald Trump’s drive toward war against North Korea.
Members of the Women’s Strike for Peace, including Coretta Scott King (right), participate in a demonstration across from the United Nations in New York City on Nov. 1, 1963. After her husband’s death, Coretta Scott King continued to protest injustices in the world. “The woman power of this nation,” she said, “can be the power which makes us whole and heals the broken community now so shattered by war and poverty and racism.” Martin Luther King Jr. himself was supportive of such agencies as Planned Parenthood and even penned a column in Ebony in 1957 that said, “I do not think it is correct to argue that birth control is sinful.” He added: “Women must be considered as more than ‘breeding machines.’”
People rally in Chicago for the second annual Women’s March on Jan. 20, 2018. Marches were held across the country – and world – to encourage women to fight for gender equality and social justice through political engagement.