geekyAs the foremost civil rights leader of his time, Dr. Martin Luther King met with three sitting presidents and one future president, in his efforts to influence national advances in the field of improved rights for African Americans. During the administration of Dwight Eisenhower, Dr. King would endorse Ike in two election campaigns. Even though he was never fully satisfied with Eisenhower's efforts at addressing civil rights issues, Dr. King saw Eisenhower as the better of two unsatisfactory choices.
In the election of 1960, King initially favored Richard Nixon as the better candidate in the race. Nixon had been a strong supporter of Dr. King while Vice-President. Nixon was Eisenhower's front man in many meetings with African-American groups. But when King was jailed in Birmingham, both of the main candidates for President were asked to visit Dr. King's wife, Mrs. Coretta Scott King. Candidate Nixon declined, while his opponent, John F. Kennedy agreed to visit Mrs. King. This gesture likely resulted in a significant amount of African-Americans voting for Kennedy in the election of 1960.
King was demanding of Kennedy for legislative changes that he was unable to obtain under the Eisenhower administration. On December 13, 1961, King and other ministers sent a telegram to Kennedy urging the President "to issue at once by Executive Order a Second Emancipation Proclamation to free all Negroes from second class citizenship" and "to use every means available to release at once the hundreds of persons now in jail in Albany, Georgia for simply seeking to exercise constitutional rights and to stand up for freedom."
King was among the leaders of the six civil rights organizations who organized the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which took place on August 28, 1963. Kennedy initially opposed the march, because he believed it would negatively impact the drive for passage of civil rights legislation, but the organizers were firm that the march would proceed. King's "I Have a Dream" speech electrified the crowd. The March, and especially King's speech, helped put civil rights at the top of the Democrats' political agenda and hastened the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
President Lyndon Johnson did more than any other President to bring about the passage of civil rights legislation. But Johnson and King clashed over the Vietnam War. In an April 4, 1967 appearance at the New York City Riverside Church (exactly one year before his death) King delivered a speech titled "Beyond Vietnam". In the speech, he spoke strongly against the U.S.'s role in the war, insisting that the U.S. was in Vietnam "to occupy it as an American colony" and calling the U.S. government "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." King also was opposed to the war on the grounds that the war took money and resources that could have been spent on social welfare services. He argued that Congress was spending more on the military and less on anti-poverty programs and summed up by saying "a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death". King's opposition cost him significant support among many of his allies, including President Johnson, union leaders and the news media.
At 6:01 p.m. on April 4, 1968, while in Memphis, Dr. King was shot as he stood on the Lorraine Motel's second floor balcony. The bullet entered through his right cheek, smashing his jaw, then traveled down his spinal cord before lodging in his shoulder. After emergency chest surgery, King was pronounced dead at St. Joseph's Hospital at 7:05 p.m. According to biographer Taylor Branch, King's autopsy revealed that though only thirty-nine years old, he had the heart of a sixty-year-old man, perhaps a result of the stress of thirteen years in the civil rights movement.
President Lyndon B. Johnson declared April 7 a national day of mourning for the King. Three other Presidents were influenced by this great civil rights giant. Dr. King was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977 by President Jimmy Carter and the Congressional Gold Medal in 2004 by President George W. Bush. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day was established as a U.S. federal holiday in 1986 by President Ronald Reagan.
