This year let’s honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., by remembering his final mission — and by picking up the mantle he left behind.
Dr. King was assassinated in Memphis in April 1968 while supporting striking sanitation workers and preparing to launch the Poor People’s Campaign. He was there because he had come to understand something fundamental about American life: that racism and economic exploitation are intertwined, and that neither can be defeated without confronting both.
He was not killed while leading a desegregation battle in a northern suburb. He was killed while trying to unite economically struggling Americans across racial lines around shared demands for dignity, wages, and opportunity.
The Poor People’s Campaign was designed to confront that reality directly. King envisioned a coalition of poor people drawn from many communities — Black and white, Native American, Latino, Asian American and other communities pushed to the margins — coming together to demand economic rights that democracy had long promised but rarely delivered.
History reveals a pattern we are often reluctant to name.
In the United States, one of the most dangerous roles a leader can take on is the work of uniting poor and working people across racial lines — especially when that unity threatens systems that depend on division to function.
Fred Hampton understood that early.
Most people remember Hampton only as a Black Panther, frozen in time at age 21, killed during a predawn police raid in Chicago in December 1969. But before joining the Panthers, Hampton first gained recognition as a teenage organizer in the NAACP. As a youth leader, he showed a rare ability to mobilize people, build coalitions, and translate moral clarity into action.
That instinct carried forward.
As a Panther leader, Hampton helped build the original Rainbow Coalition — bringing together the Black Panthers, the Puerto Rican Young Lords, and the Young Patriots Organization, made up largely of poor white Appalachian migrants. In one of his most consequential public moments, Hampton stood at a press conference alongside William “Preacherman” Fesperman, a leader of the Young Patriots, to declare that poor and working people had more in common with each other than with the forces exploiting them.
That image — Black, brown, and white organizers standing together, unapologetically — was the point.
Less than a year later, Hampton was killed by Chicago police in a predawn raid.
Harry Moore was the founding president of the Florida NAACP and one of the most effective organizers the association ever produced. Under his leadership, Black voter registration in Florida surged despite poll taxes, intimidation, and violence. He fought for equal pay for Black teachers and worked closely with labor and progressive allies, believing racial justice and economic justice could not be separated.
Harriette Moore was not simply his wife. She was an organizer, educator and strategist who sustained the work under constant threat.
On Christmas night in 1951, a bomb exploded beneath their home in Mims, Florida. Both Harry and Harriette Moore would die from their injuries. Their crime was not extremism. It was being effective.
Malcolm X’s life followed a similar arc. After returning from Mecca in 1964, he spoke and wrote about encountering a brotherhood that crossed racial lines. His politics remained complex and uncompromising, but the direction was unmistakable: away from race as destiny and toward coalition as possibility. Within a year, he was assassinated.
Dr. King understood that uniting people across racial lines was not just morally right — it was practically necessary. It was the only way to build enough power to secure health care, fair wages, food security, and basic stability for everyone.
So, when we honor Dr. King, we should be careful to remember him accurately — not as a safely sanitized icon, but as a leader who followed justice to its most challenging conclusion.
This holiday should not simply reassure us. It should challenge us.
To remember Dr. King honestly is to remember that he died doing unfinished work — work that remains dangerous precisely because it remains necessary.
The question before us is the same one history keeps asking:
Are we willing to continue the work Dr. King died doing?
Because the pattern tells us what happens when we do.
And today’s headlines keep telling us what happens when we don’t.
Ben Jealous is a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania and former national president and CEO of the NAACP.