The Free Press: Things Worth Remembering: MLK’s Final Act of Faith, by Jonathan Eig (author of the Pulitzer Prize winning book King: A Life (2023)):

King was in Memphis on April 3, against the wishes of most of his advisers. And that’s where he would give the last speech of his life.

The protest in Memphis had attracted little media attention, and King wasn’t planning to speak at all that night. But when civil rights activist and Baptist minister Ralph Abernathy called upon him, King got out of bed and made his way to Mason Temple.

He spoke without notes. The speech, like so many of his, was meant to energize his audience, to fortify them for a fight, to prepare them to make a sacrifice, if necessary, for something bigger and more important than themselves. Here, he was raging against a citywide injunction to block their planned protest. …

[T]oday, the context of the speech is impossible to ignore. As Abernathy listened to it, he grew worried. He’d heard King speak hundreds if not thousands of times, but never like this, with tears in his eyes, utterly spent, looking as if he might collapse.

King said to his audience that he didn’t know how much longer he would be with them. He was the recipient of persistent death threats, including one received that very morning, when someone had threatened to blow up his plane to Memphis. But he was glad to be alive and committed to engaging in the struggle for freedom. He was willing to die in the struggle if necessary.

“And so, I’m happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man! Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!”

He would be killed the very next day.

This was not a man at the very height of his power, bellowing, “I have a dream” to the masses. This was a man who was exhausted, wholly drained, staring down a tragic end for which he likely sensed he was destined. And yet, he was grateful: for the ability to fight in pursuit of rights which, yes, were written on the country’s founding document, but more importantly, which he knew were his birthright, despite having had those rights denied to him and so many others.

Decades later, King’s legacy has helped create a world in which those rights are embedded in our hearts and instincts, just as much as in our Constitution—in large part because he elevated the role of nonviolent protest in American democracy. Most of us today don’t need to read of these rights to know they exist; they live in the air we breathe.

[Today] we mark Martin Luther King Jr. Day by remembering the great legacy King left behind. But while we should remember the man at the pinnacle of his influence, it’s equally important to remember who he was on the second-to-last day of his life: exhausted, vilified, facing a country that had turned on him, yet one he believed in anyway. The Constitution mattered, of course, but what mattered more was that its promises were worth standing up for, even when they had been broken.

How do we act in our most vulnerable moments? How do we act when our country has let us down? Fifty-eight years ago, King reminded us that he still had a dream, a dream he had read of, a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. And he wasn’t ever going to give up on it.

Christianity Today, We Have Not Read MLK Enough

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