Martin Luther King /civil rights gains reversed: Analyst

On the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in April, an African American journalist in Detroit says he believes the American icon was killed by a federal government plot because of his activism and unyielding opposition to the Vietnam War.

“In early 1967 Dr. King came out solidly against the US genocidal war against the people in Vietnam. He said that there should be an immediate ceasefire and there should be a withdrawal of US forces from Vietnam. This alienated him completely from the administration of the then President Lyndon Baines Johnson. So a year after he came out against the war he was assassinated,” said Abayomi Azikiwe, editor at the Pan-African News Wire.

He said he believes “Dr. King was assassinated as a result of a federal government conspiracy. He had been a thorn in the edifice of US capitalism and imperialism.”

“I feel very strongly that many of the gains won by the civil rights movement of the 1960s have been reversed in the subsequent decades,” through policies of the US government and police, Azikiwe said in a phone interview with Press TV.

He noted that this has created a reactionary atmosphere in the US “where people are protesting and resisting against this situation.”

Fifty years ago, on April 4, Dr. King  was assassinated. Since then, the human rights activist's name has become synonymous with the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

Dr. King was only 24 years old when he led the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott—a major event in the history of African American Civil Rights Movement.

Only two years later in 1957, he became the president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which he helped found the same year.

As the leader of SCLC, Dr. King formed a large desegregation coalition in Albany, Georgia in 1962, and fought for equal rights.

The movement, however, was unsuccessful as it was met with a strong opposition within city officials. But King was never discouraged by the “limited success,” as he himself called it.

In 1963, he helped organize the nonviolent protests in Birmingham, Alabama, and then proceeded to arrange the March on Washington the same year.

Described as one of the largest political rallies for human rights in the history of the US, the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom” took place in Washington, DC, on August 28, 1963.

It was at this event that Dr. King made his momentous “I Have A Dream” speech for a crowd of approximately 300,000 at the Lincoln Memorial.

The peaceful protest has been said to be the main force behind the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or nationality.

A year later, the Voting Rights Act was passed, banning racial discrimination in voting.

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