Chasing King's Killer: The Hunt for Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Assassin

King is best known for leading the civil rights movement with nonviolent resistance. Violence against Black people was endemic in the post-Civil War American South, and changing that system meant facing a great deal of danger and abuse. Although the civil rights movement was founded on the principle of nonviolence, violent opposition followed the movement and its leaders everywhere they went. Swanson illustrates how there was a violent response to every nonviolent act of resistance. In fact, this was part of King’s strategy: He used peaceful demonstrations to highlight the violence and injustice of the racist system he opposed. 

Swanson describes how commonplace violence against Black people was in the Jim Crow South, explaining, “Intimidation, violence, and murder were essential tools in the suppression of African Americans” (29). Across the South, Black people were subject to horrific crimes carried out by white supremacists, members of the Ku Klux Klan, and even law enforcement officials. These attacks were completely normalized. They were rarely reported in the news and, therefore, remained largely invisible to the outside world. 

As a young man, two important experiences formed King’s view on nonviolent resistance. One was reading the essay “Notes on Civil Disobedience” by Henry David Thoreau, and the other was learning about Mohandas Gandhi’s methods of peaceful resistance in winning India’s independence from the British Empire. King became convinced that “noncooperation with evil” was “a moral obligation” (35). He decided to lead the civil rights movement with nonviolent protest aimed at unmasking the racist violence that Black people faced every day in the South.

One of the most effective and controversial demonstrations occurred on May 2 and 3, 1968, when nearly a thousand Black children of all ages marched in Birmingham, Alabama. The police attacked the children with dogs and firehoses, and many were taken to jail. The photos from this protest were published internationally, “expos[ing] the evil of racial discrimination in ‘the land of the free’” (53). In the wake of international outcry, President John F. Kennedy realized that he finally had to address the issue of Civil Rights. 

Many of these retaliatory acts of violence were aimed at King himself, as if “in the last dying gasp of the racist Old South, a century’s worth of hatred and vitriol was now aimed at him” (126). Undaunted, King turned his ideology of nonviolence into a way of life and faced these threats bravely and peacefully. He continued to fight for Civil Rights, accepting “the dangers, risks, and uncertainty” (24) that came with his position. Ultimately, King’s murder was another act that exposed the hate and evil he opposed and emphasized the need for change.