Martin Luther King: A Legacy Revisited – clip

Peniel E. Joseph / University of Texas

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is the most important civil rights leader in American history, whose commitment to Black citizenship helped to inaugurate a new birth of freedom, both domestically and internationally. In the years before his 1968 assassination, King became a national symbol for racial justice, a Nobel Prize-winning global political mobilizer, and a statesman who dined with presidents and royalty. And at the same time, he organized alongside of the racially and economically oppressed. He has become extolled as a contemporary founding father who made racial justice central to the American postwar political project. We commemorate his legacy annually as one of the few remaining symbols of bipartisanship, racial unity, and political progress.