Understanding Martin Luther King Jr. 50 Years After His Death

People around the world are remembering Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who was killed 50 years ago today. Among them is Dr. Harvard Sitkoff, who will be speaking at Wake Forest University this week. He's the author of "King: Pilgrimage to the Mountaintop," which examines the leader's life and legacy.

Sitkoff spoke with WFDD's Bethany Chafin. 

Interview Highlights

On how Martin Luther King Jr. not only influenced the civil rights movement but was also shaped by it:

After Montgomery there was a period of a couple of years where nothing much was happening in the civil rights movement. And King himself seemed to be floundering. He had helped to establish the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, but it played no significant role in the late 50s. Then came the civil rights movement, and that was followed by a lot of young people getting involved in 1961 with the Freedom Rides. And all those actions kept pushing the movement to larger and larger goals. And King, to his credit, moved with the movement. Even though he didn't initiate a lot of the changes, he understood their importance. And you know I think, like leaders in other times, he realized that he had to get with his people in order to lead his people.

On King's work after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965:

Well, we need to remember that it was just one week after President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that much of Watts, the neighborhood in Los Angeles, went up in smoke and massive rioting, rioting then which continued largely unabated for the next three years. The long hot summers...it shook the nation, and [King] turned increasingly to issues of slum housing and malnutrition and the poor education of so many black children. And increasingly it was the War on Poverty that preoccupied King.

On where Sitkoff was when he heard about King's assassination:

I was then a graduate student in New York City at Columbia University, and I heard about the assassination and I knew I had to go to his funeral in Atlanta, that I would never forgive myself if I didn't attend that. And despite the fact of being a pretty poor graduate student at the time, I was able to scrape together enough money to go to Atlanta and then stood on the streets as King passed by.

On how society views King 50 years after his death:

I definitely think we understand him a lot less today than perhaps we did in 1968. I think the annual celebrations of King Day, of the day marking the anniversary of King's assassination, has turned him into a kind of a saint, an American saint, rather than the radical that he in fact was. So we hear over and over and over again, 'I have a dream, I have a dream,' you know, and it's of little black children and white children playing together. And I think that is a very noble dream. It certainly was my dream at the time; it continues to be. But there's so much more to King's career. And that is what doesn't get acknowledged in most celebrations today.