Many people who were alive during the nation’s Civil Rights Movement felt that America stood still April 4, 1968, the day the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed by an assassin’s bullet. The energy he had generated among millions in years of aggressive campaigning and preaching for progress and civility had suddenly lost its compass, steam and determination.
Today, a half-century after his death, society is perplexed and sending mixed signals about whether it continues to embrace the civil rights-era goals and achievements that King and others fought and died for, say academics who focus on race relations and educational policy and practices.
“Things have changed in some ways. In others, we are where we were 50 years ago,” said Georgetown University law professor Sheryll Cashin, the daughter of Alabama civil rights workers John and Joan Cashin.
Most people today believe King was on “the right side of history,” said Cashin, who was 6 years old the year King was killed. “A lot of people believe in that in abstract, but not in structural change,” she said, voicing sentiments similar to those offered by some colleagues at institutions across the country.
Mixed signals abound, said Dr. DeShawn Preston, a higher education research scholar at the Southern Education Foundation. Preston suggested that many of King’s goals are still being pursued and many of King’s contemporaries in the struggle would be disappointed.
“In many ways, we’ve not progressed to where Dr. King had dreamed of,” said Preston, an Oakwood College graduate who last year earned a Ph.D. in educational leadership from the once racially segregated Clemson University.
“We’re still fighting and marching for our civil rights, most recently in Sacramento. I don’t imagine anywhere in his dreams he would imagine us being shot and killed and still fighting with our justice system.”
