Lee Sustar: Faced with hostility from the Johnson administration, criticism from both black nationalists and the black establishment, and a divided staff, King was politically isolated as never before when he was assassinated in Memphis on April 4, 1968 — less than three weeks before the Poor People’s Campaign was to begin. King had travelled to Memphis to support a strike by black sanitation workers — he was the only national civil rights leader to do so. Yet it wasn’t long after his death that the media hacks of the ruling class began to convert King into a harmless saint. To do this, however, they had to bury the real legacy of Martin Luther King — both the leader of the critical early struggles of the civil rights movement who refused to accept pleas for patience and moderation from his liberal Democratic allies, and the more radical black leader of the late 1960s whose vision of what needed to be changed in society had widened enormously.
