The legacy of M.L. King, 50 years later

WINSTED —  On the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Northwestern Connecticut Community College (NCCC) offered a program that tied together the history of the civil rights movement and social justice struggles in America today.  

King was assassinated in Memphis, Tenn., on April 4, 1968.

At the start of the program, NCCC Librarian Seth Kershner showed clips from the 1993 documentary “At the River I Stand,” which is about the 1968 sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis. The workers were protesting degrading working conditions and the poverty-level wages they earned.

 King was killed the day after he arrived in Memphis to support the strikers. 

As he introduced the film, Kershner tried to offer a fuller, deeper picture of King’s work and legacy.

“To remember Dr. King only for what he has done for civil rights diminishes his legacy,” Kershner said. 

“We often forget that he was concerned about war, militarism and economic injustice. He would talk about how the civil rights movement was not enough. 

“It was not enough to win the right for African-Americans to sit at the lunch counter if they didn’t have enough money to buy something.”

Kershner said that King developed and launched the Poor People’s Campaign just before he was killed.

“The campaign sought the redistribution of wealth and sought to mobilize poor people of all colors in America to come and camp out in a tent city in the nation’s capital and stay there until their demands were met,” Kershner said. “It was a precursor of Occupy Wall Street.”

The campaign fell apart after King’s assassination, Kershner said. 

Fifty years later, as part of a revived national Poor People’s Campaign movement, both Hartford Bishop John Selders and his wife, Pamela, along with activist Cornell Lewis, started the organization Moral Monday Connecticut. Selders spoke at NCCC as part of the program on April 24.

The purpose of Moral Monday Connecticut is to address a wide range of social justice issues, including civil rights, restrictions on voting rights and issues addressed nationwide by Black Lives Matter.

“Pamela and I are from St. Louis, Missouri,” Selders told the audience, adding that, “You would know St. Louis by another name: Ferguson.”

He was referring to the shooting of Michael Brown in August 2014. Many Americans felt that justice was not meted out satisfactorily in that case; there were mass protests for weeks after the shooting and trial.

“It led us to what we are doing now here in Connecticut,” Selders said. “This led many communities across the country to rethink the issues and be in conversation and dialogue about where black and brown people are.”

Selders gave a history of successful activist movements, including those that helped create the United States. 

“Activism is something that this country has been doing since its very beginning,” Selders said. “Have you heard about the Boston Tea Party? Back then, it moved this nation into its own United States and its freedom from England. This is in much the same way that the Public Accommodations Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were created. It was the people who put pressure on the politicians.”

Selders said that, 50 years after King’s assassination, many of the same issues still exist.

“Racism is still what it is,” Selders said. “It’s alive and well.”