workingclasshistory:

On this day, 4 April 1968, civil rights activist, socialist and advocate of nonviolence Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated while in Memphis supporting a strike of African-American sanitation workers.
His ideas had become increasing radical in recent years, and in addition to opposing racism had begun opposing US imperialism in Vietnam and elsewhere, and capitalism itself. And he had begun organising a Poor People’s Campaign, to unite working class and poor people, Black and white.
Though he is widely lauded by establishment figures now, at the time he was hated by the rich and powerful as well as most white Americans. Fuelled by negative media coverage, only 22% of Americans approved of “Freedom Rides” for the desegregation of public transport, and 63% disapproved of King.
The FBI’s domestic intelligence chief called him “the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro and national security”, and later sent King an anonymous letter attempting to blackmail him into suicide.
His murder by a white supremacist left many disillusioned with pacifism, and riots broke out across the US in the biggest explosion of social unrest since the civil war. The Memphis sanitation strike was part of a wave of stoppages across the US during the Vietnam war.
We have made available in our online store this book by the King family’s lawyer, who won their civil case which implicated US security services in his murder: https://shop.workingclasshistory.com/collections/books/products/an-act-of-state-the-execution-of-martin-luther-king-william-f-pepper
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