The recent birthday remembrance for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and its surveys of his significant accomplishments lacked, at least for me, any canvas of why he announced, the night before his assassination, “I may not get there with you to the promised land.”

King knew that he, like President Kennedy and Malcolm X before him, was targeted for death by elements in the U.S. government. It was only a question of when. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had played a role in the murder of Malcolm in Harlem, as he is now known to have been involved in the murder of rising Black leader Fred Hampton in Chicago on Dec. 4, 1969.

Hoover had harassed and wiretapped King. He publicly labeled him “the most dangerous Negro in America.” King was mounting a campaign to bring masses of people to a summer 1968 encampment in Washington, pressing Congress for economic justice for all the nation’s poor. Exactly a year earlier he had addressed a massive crowd in New York, denouncing the government for its war in Vietnam.

Facing King’s motel in Memphis, where he was supporting sanitation strikers, was a bank of shrubbery. This was perfect cover for an assassin. From it came the bullet that killed King. By next morning Memphis authorities had carried out their part in the murder by cutting and removing all the shrubbery, that is, by destroying the crime scene.

Of course there was an ex-con carefully scripted to take the rap. After the drama of an international chase, James Earl Ray’s lawyer got him to cop a plea to avoid the death penalty. As with Oswald in the death of JFK, a revelatory trial was avoided.

Dr. King’s 94th birthday should have been celebrated with a cake, one shared with a gathering of well-wishers recalling his roll in obtaining justice for people of color and the economically disadvantaged.

In April 1963, King was just getting started!

The coup that ended John Kennedy’s life might have been unraveled during his brother Robert’s presidency. We might have halved the destruction of Vietnam. Warm relations with Cuba and other socialist countries might well have been established. Toleration of the political path of others, such as in China, could have avoided tensions and threat.

Begun with an apology for historic wrongs, U.S. relations with Iran might today be cozy. Its hard under such circumstances to imagine an attack on the World Trade Center even being considered.

Robert Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev would have reopened stalled denuclearization and disarmament initiatives. Mr. Putin would not today feel provoked.

This is not to suggest that Dr. King with the help of John Lewis and others would, alone, accomplish so much. Inspired by Gandhi, they were trying to set in motion an era of love, kindness and honest government.

The problem King addressed had been festering for a hundred years.

People of color had been deprived the benefits of citizenship and were being killed by the thousands. Lincoln’s armies had won the crucial battles but the rebellious South wound up winning the war. The cotton economy was thriving on freed slaves snared into a system of sharecropping. White supremacy gripped the South.

President Grant maintained a post-war occupation force in the South that allowed a measure of hope and progress for people who had been enslaved, but by the end of his second term northerners no longer supported this reconstruction.

In the election of 1876, politics displaced both morality and legality. The Democratic candidate, Samuel Tilden, had won the election with both a popular vote majority and electoral college count of 184 to 165. Success for Republican Rutherford Hayes depended on gaining all of 20 disputed votes.

“Tilden or war,” proclaimed Southern newspapers. Reportedly, thousands of armed men were prepared to march on Washington and renew the Civil War. Blacks were alarmed that a Tilden victory might mean reestablishment of slavery.

While a congressional commission dithered over how to resolve the problem, allies of the parties met secretly. In return for giving all 20 disputed votes to Hayes, Republicans agreed to withdraw federal troops from the South. The calamitous agreement brought reconstruction to an end, empowered Southerners to fully restore white supremacy and absolute control of the Black population, and belatedly snatch victory from defeat in the war. Thus began the 100 years of Black suppression, denial of the vote, the lynching of 4,000, the “all” that King and others rose to confront.

Most poignant was the army’s response. They announced they were now free to defeat the Indians in the West.

Charlemont resident Carl Doerner is an author and historian. He is now editing his new work, “Breaking the Silence: Revisioning the American Narrative.”

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