By Kehinde Andrews
Fifty years ago today the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King was assassinated. It was a murder that sent shockwaves around the world. King had come to personify the civil rights movement, the nonviolent campaign for racial justice that forced America to changes its laws. By 1968 Britain’s Black population was growing and with it a civil rights movement of our own. The Bristol bus boycott of 1963 followed in the footsteps of the more famous episode with Rosa Parks at the centre in Montgomery, Alabama. Black supplementary schools had begun to emerge marking the beginning of decades of campaigning to reform the racist school system. Anti-racist activism across all areas including housing and immigration was already in full swing. King himself visited the UK, going to London in 1964 and receiving and an honorary doctorate from Newcastle University in 1967, just a year before he was killed. Half a century later King is rightly one of the most revered figures in history and a symbol for Black communities worldwide, and no less so in Britain. But, in order to celebrate his legacy fully it is time to realise the politics that he most represents has run its course. As we struggle with racism in the present day, the last thing we need is a new civil rights movement.
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