For years, King repeatedly assured the American public that he was no radical, but justified the struggle as reflecting mainstream U.S. political values. Civil rights, he said, "is...a moral issue...which may well determine the destiny of our nation in the ideological struggle with communism." He further stated, "We are out to defeat injustice and not white persons who may be unjust...By nonviolent resistance, the Negro can also enlist all men of good will in his struggle for equality."

King wasn't naïve, however. His strategy encompassed an inside-outside approach to the Democratic Party, challenging the Democrats' racist one-party states across the South, while using protests to put pressure on national Democratic leaders such as John F. Kennedy and his successor in the White House, Lyndon Johnson.

To that end, King endured constant death threats amid the bloody repression in the South and saw the inside of several jails--all while maintaining connections to the White House.

The massive 1963 March on Washington--and the assassination of Kennedy soon afterward--provided the political momentum to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1964, which finally guaranteed the right of Blacks to vote almost a century after the end of the Civil War. The Civil Rights Act the following year outlawed segregation as well.

Yet the struggle continued--and grew more complex. The Northern Democrats who praised King's activism in the South became hostile when activists turned their attention to the problems of Black unemployment and poverty in Northern cities. King's efforts to fight ghetto housing and poverty in Chicago, for example, ran into bitter--and violent--racist opposition against efforts to desegregate housing. There were big protests, plenty of promises from politicians--but few results.

Young radicals in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee began to view King as yesterday's man as they looked toward the revolutionary ideas of the Black nationalist Malcolm X.

King emphatically rejected the popular slogan of "Black Power" as divisive--which garnered him even more criticism from militants and the left. The issue of civil rights had been superceded by issues facing the Black working class, North and South.

King, however, was himself moving to the left. He prevailed in getting his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), to oppose the Vietnam War--and Lyndon Johnson cut his ties with King soon afterward.

King went on to formulate a broader effort to challenge the priorities of U.S. society. This inevitably meant challenging the Democratic Party, which controlled both Congress and the White House.

To that end, King launched the Poor People's Movement that aimed to camp outside the White House in 1968 to demand a massive increase in social spending as well as an end to the war in Vietnam. King, however, was killed by an assassin's bullet before the Poor People's Movement got off the ground. What's often forgotten is the fact that he was killed in Memphis, where he was supporting striking Black sanitation workers.

While it's impossible to predict what King's political evolution might have been, it's clear that he was drawing far more radical conclusions than are generally acknowledged. And the issues King raised at the end of his life still stand before us today.

"We must honestly face the fact that the movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society," he told the SCLC convention in 1967. "There are 40 million poor people here. And one day, we must ask the question: 'Why are there 40 million poor people in America?' And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy."

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