AP Photo/Charles Harrity Addressing the press in Chicago, March 24, 1967 This article appears in the Spring 2018 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here . I n August 1967, in a sermon at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, Martin Luther King Jr. observed that he and the congregation were living in “evil times.” His remark was brutally punctuated on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee, when King was assassinated. What should we focus upon in marking the 50th anniversary of this somber landmark? I suggest three things: the particulars of King’s achievements as a liberal dissident; the trying circumstances he faced at the end of his life; and the virtues of his principal strategy and aim—coalition politics in the service of a decent, egalitarian, multiracial society. King was a great man—not a pseudo-hero but the genuine article, one of the most remarkable dissidents in American, indeed world, history. He was at the forefront of three campaigns that defined...