Welcome to Things Worth Remembering, our weekly column in which writers share a poem or paragraph that all of us should commit to heart. This week, on the eve of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Jonathan Eig reflects on the very last speech Dr. King ever gave: a profound display of devotion to the principles of a nation that had turned on him.
Didn’t Martin Luther King Jr. have someplace better to be on April 3, 1968, than Memphis, Tennessee, in support of a sanitation workers’ strike?
Not really.
By then, King was almost five years removed from his “I Have a Dream” address at the March on Washington. His powers were waning. The civil rights movement was waning, too. The Vietnam War had shattered the liberal consensus for King’s proposed civil and economic policies, and protests in American cities were erupting in very un-Kingian violence. In a private phone call recorded by the FBI, King told one of his friends that he felt as if no one was listening to him anymore. And he was right: When asked in a Gallup survey how they felt about King, nearly two-thirds of Americans said they disapproved of his activities.
