This year marks the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. A year before his death, during his "Where Do We Go from Here?" speech, he said that "in spite of a decade of significant progress, the problem is far from solved."
In honor of King's legacy, throughout this month we will be highlighting some of our recent titles that shed light on the progress we’ve made and the work still to be done. To read Part One, click here. Read Part Two, an excerpt from Brother to a Dragonfly by Will D. Campbell, below.
Marchers and onlookers in downtown Natchez. March 5, 1967. Photograph by Jim Lucas,
from A Past That Won’t Rest: Images of the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi.
from A Past That Won’t Rest: Images of the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi.
Birmingham, April 12, 1963
"In Birmingham . . . Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and several
other ministers were arrested, fire hoses were turned on demonstrators with
such force that their only defense was to lie flat on the streets, letting the
velocity of the water roll them along like seashells at high tide. Police dogs
were used on marchers, including schoolchildren. It was the year four little
girls were murdered at their prayers when a bomb exploded in the Sixteenth
Street Baptist Church. President Kennedy expressed Americans’ 'deep sense of
outrage and grief,' but the crime was never solved."
From Brother to a Dragonfly by Will D. Campbell
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