In an interview with FRANCE 24, Martin Luther King III, the son of Martin Luther King Jr, recounted the anger and frustration he felt upon learning about the death of George Floyd, an unarmed African American suffocated by a white police officer. He said that while it was part of a long list of such killings, Floyd's murder had galvanised the nation and the world in a way he had never witnessed before.
Reacting to the worldwide protest movement sparked by the death of George Floyd, the son of Martin Luther King Jr said that the breadth of the protests and the massive presence of white protesters made it a much larger movement than the one that followed the assassination of his father in 1968. "I've never seen anything quite like this in my life," Martin Luther King III told FRANCE 24. King said that if his father were alive, he would be angered that racial inequalities are still ingrained but at the same time would embrace the protest movement.
King, a human rights activist like his father, expressed confidence that the US Congress was now under pressure to come up with real change when it comes to the treatment of African Americans. If not, he warned that there were already discussions in African American circles about organising business boycotts in order to ramp up the pressure on the business community.
Finally, King said he did not believe that Donald Trump would be able to replicate what Richard Nixon did in 1968, when he won the presidency on a law-and-order platform following the protest movement at that time. He also said Trump had the "behaviour" of a racist person, pointing to his refusal to envisage a change to US military bases named after Civil War Confederate leaders.
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