6: The Accidental Leader

Alicia Garza, co-founder of Black Lives Matter and a community organizer, talks about Martin Luther King's legacy, the fight for racial justice today and why she doesn't look forward to Martin Luther King Day.

Vincent Harding was Martin Luther King's longtime friend and advisor. They first met in 1958 when King was laid up in bed, recovering from an assassination attempt. Harding said King's death made some people in the civil rights movement wonder if the country was worth fighting for.

Clayborne Carson, the director of the King Papers Project, says Martin Luther King Jr. was an "accidental" civil rights leader. Carson argues we created another King -- someone he never was -- the moment he died.

Fifty years ago, at 6:00 in the evening, Martin Luther King Jr. was standing on the balcony of his hotel room, trying to decide if he needed a coat.

In the spring of 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. disregarded the advice of his entire staff and traveled to Memphis, Tennessee, in support of striking sanitation workers.

Under the leadership of J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI conducted a relentless campaign to track, spy on and harass Martin Luther King Jr. All tactics were fair game in their effort to "neutralize" the civil rights leader.

In the last months of his life, Martin Luther King Jr. struggled to launch a new phase in the civil rights movement: He wanted to bring the nation's poor to Washington D.C. for what he hoped would be the longest running protest in history.

Exactly one year before his death, Martin Luther King Jr. stood in Riverside Church and denounced the Vietnam War. It was a radical move - and it may have been the beginning of the end for King.

On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was shot to death in Memphis, Tenn. Half a century later, he remains a vivid symbol of hope for racial equality in America. But his politics were much more complex - and radical -- than most people realize. King's Last March, coming April 4, explores the lesser-known story of the Civil Rights icon's last year of life.