Martin Luther King's struggle, a Capitol riot, and America's immoral arc of white supremacy that bends back

A member of the National Guard walks by a boarded up building with a poster of US civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. on a holiday observed in his name in Washington DC. — AFP

THE Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr marched mile after mile to pressure America to live up to its too often broken promises of freedom and equality – but he refused to ever take a victory lap. When King spoke on May 10,1967 – in what proved to be the last year of his life – to an interracial group of Atlanta leaders known as the Hungry Club Forum, he could have bragged about his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize or the landmark laws he'd just successfully fought for, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But the civil rights icon could only see the massive work that was still undone.

"Racial injustice is still the Negro's burden and America's shame," said King, who was facing a growing white backlash in 1967 as he pushed hard for Black economic equality and to end the Vietnam War. "And we must face the hard fact that many Americans would like to have a nation which is a democracy for white Americans but simultaneously a dictatorship over Black Americans. We must face the fact that we still have much to do in the area of race relations."