Brandon R. Byrd is an Assistant Professor of History at Vanderbilt University and an intellectual historian of the 19th and 20th century United States with specializations in African American History and the African Diaspora. His first book, The Black Republic: African Americans, Haiti, and the Rise of Radical Black Internationalism, is forthcoming with the University of Pennsylvania Press.
Fifty years later, we’re still hearing the same sorry excuses for racially motivated violence, and avoiding the hard truths that King asked us to face.