James Barklamb is our Global Intern at the Louisiana Capital Assistance Center in New Orleans. He recently visited the National Civil Rights Museum and penned this post. You can also read his first post at https://jbarklamb.wordpress.com
2018 marks 50 years since Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. In the half century since, there have been gains- both real and symbolic- in the fight for racial equality. But any sense that the underlying injustice and disparity in circumstance that underlay the civil rights movement is remedied, is evidently misplaced.
The night before Dr. King was killed, he proclaimed he had seen the “mountaintop”, in what is now recognised as one of his greatest speeches. At its core, the speech is a meditation on service through collective action; service that sublimates the individual at the head of a movement, in pursuit of the movement’s greater longevity and sustainability.
It is therefore unsurprising that the speech reaches its crescendo in Dr. King pronouncing his great fortune at having survived a life-threatening stabbing to witness a series of…
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