Shadow of Martin Luther King on the U.S. Campaign

Barack Obama’s sympathizers have reappropriated Dr. King’s torch, the American martyr for the Blacks’ cause.

Forty years after the great civil rights leader’s death, the racial question is at the heart of the election to come.

On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Junior was killed, at 6pm, in Memphis (Tennessee) by a bullet that entered his jaw and neck. During the days that followed, there were riots in 125 cities, and 300,000 people attended his funeral. The killer, James Earl Ray, who confessed to the crime and then retracted, died in prison in 1998 without putting an end to the conspiracy theories.

Forty years later, a young black politician, Barack Obama, has a serious chance of being elected President of the United States. “Could Dr. King have imagined such a revolution? Taking into the political circumstances into account, I think that this anniversary is even more important,” says Lynette Clemetson, Editor in Chief of the African-American community magazine The Root.

The pacifist militant figure is engraved in bronze: the Lorraine Motel, where he was shot at the age of 39, became the National Civil Rights Museum; since 1986, Americans have observed a national commemoration day for him; more than 700 cities have at least one street in his name. But Martin Luther King’s heritage has always been embedded in the news, especially in this electoral campaign.

Hillary Clinton was criticized when she appeared to minimize the role of the preacher from Atlanta, recalling that it “took a president, Lyndon Johnson, to realize his dream.” Barack Obama also found himself caught up in a polemic storm because of statements from his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, about the persisting inequality between the races.

Canonized in American Heroes

According to a study on the “unaccomplished American dream,” the average income of the Black community, which represented 54% of Whites’ income in 1967, still remains at 57%. At this rate, it would take five centuries to reach equality. “The racial question is one that the nation cannot allow itself to ignore today,” declared the Illinois Senator last month in Philadelphia in a speech deemed “historic”. “We have made progress: we are free but not equal,” said Jesse Jackson, Dr. King’s companion on the road.

On this anniversary, America rediscovered the inflamed and often polemic rhetoric from the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize winner. On the eve of his assassination, the celebrated “I have a dream” author denounced the Vietnam War and in terms that strangely echoed Reverend Wright’s teachings. “His canonization as an American hero has undermined his power, believes Pr. Harvard Sitkoff, one of his biographers. King is the kind person who helped us to solve our past problems in place of the person who challenges us to resolve current injustices.”