Martin Luther King Jr. was a Baptist minister and leader in the civil rights movement from 1954 until his assassination in 1968. He led the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott and in 1963 helped organize protests in Birmingham and the March on Washington. In 1957, King became the first president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In 1964, he won the Nobel Peace Prize for combating racial inequality through nonviolent resistance. King was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. In 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed legislation designating the third Monday in January as Martin Luther King Day, a federal holiday. Will his legacy last.....or will it be lost?
A new Supreme Court is poised to take a chunk out of MLK's legacy
John Blake, CNN, Jan 20 2019
One is called the "child of the storm." Another is "the crown jewel." The third was dubbed "the voice of justice." They are the three great laws of the civil rights movement: the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. A new conservative bloc on the Supreme Court though may soon treat them as something else: outdated "racial entitlements" that need to be put back in their place.
That's the dreaded future some experts envision for these landmark laws now that Justice Brett Kavanaugh has joined the Supreme Court. They warn that, for the first time, the high court has five firmly conservative judges who were groomed to dismantle the legal legacy of these laws, which have stood for 50 years. "They will chip away at these laws until there is nothing left," says Carol Anderson, author of One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy. "I can see the court tilting further and further to the right until we end up with a dystopian society."
Such steady erosion would halt what some call the "Second American Civil Rights Revolution." It would also destroy a central plank in the legacy of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. When the nation celebrates the King holiday on Monday, much of the focus will be on his stirring speeches and dramatic marches but these three laws are as central to King's legacy as his "I have a dream" speech.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/20/us/ml...urt/index.html