The World and Everything in It: April 6, 2026

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MARY REICHARD, HOST: Good morning!

The Supreme Court applies old law to new problems as it weighs birthright citizenship.

ALITO: We're dealing with something that was basically unknown when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted, which is illegal immigration.

NICK EICHER, HOST: That’s ahead on Legal Docket.

Also today, the Monday Moneybeat: energy shocks and a shaky jobs picture. David Bahnsen is standing by.

And later, the World History Book: Questions that still linger around the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

KING: We are going to do everything in our power to try and make sure that justice will prevail.

REICHARD: It’s Monday, April 6th. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. 

I’m Mary Reichard.

EICHER: And I’m Nick Eicher. Good morning!

REICHARD: Up next, Kent Covington with today’s news.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Iran rescue mission » New details are emerging about the daring rescue of two American aviators shot down over Iran. The U.S. pulled both crew members from behind enemy lines with no Americans killed.

The first aviator from a downed F-15-E Strike Eagle was rescued in broad daylight in a seven-hour operation. The second, a weapons systems officer, hid in a mountain crevice, climbing seven-thousand feet despite injuries as Iran urged citizens to find him and turn him in for a cash reward.

U.S. Gen. Frank McKenzie:

MCKENZIE:  They put a out, a broad appeal to their people to turn 'em in. Reward, asking for all kinds of leads. That does not appear to have been successful. And that would, I think that's maybe a sign of disaffection. Don't know, but you can't, uh, you can't be happy with that if you're a senior leader in Tehran.

The CIA ran a deception campaign inside Iran, spreading false word that the U.S. had already found him, buying time to pinpoint his location.

The U.S. then laid down heavy fire in the area surrounding the spot where they believed the aviator was hiding … to keep Iranian forces away.

Finally, hundreds of U.S. special operations forces swarmed in for the rescue.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu congratulated President Trump and U.S. forces.

NETANYAHU:  All Israelis rejoice in the incredible rescue of a brave American pilot by America's Dauntless warriors. This proves that when free societies muster their courage and their resolve, they can confront seemingly insurmountable odds and overcome the forces of darkness and terror.

The aviator is seriously wounded but expected to recover.

Two Black Hawks came under fire but reached safe airspace, and the U.S. blew up two transport planes left behind after a technical malfunction. Iran claims it shot the planes down.

Other Iran latest » General McKenzie also told CBS’ Face the Nation Sunday that U.S. force have accomplished much of what they set out to do — namely, crushing Iran’s ability to inflict mass destruction.

MCKENZIE:  They have the ability to inflict damage. They do not have the ability to gain mass effects. And by mass effects, I mean firing many, many dozens of rockets, missiles, or drones. Uh, I think that capability has been eroded steadily since this campaign began.

Meantime, President Trump is giving Iran until Tuesday to open the Strait of Hormuz or face massive new strikes. Trump posted the threat Sunday, vowing to hit Iran's power plants and bridges.

Trump has set such deadlines before, but extended them when mediators claimed progress.

Artemis II update » The Artemis II crew is closing in on the moon this morning, set for a historic lunar flyby later today. The crew of four is carrying out humanity's first human deep-space mission since Apollo 17 in 1972.

NASA's acting head of Exploration Systems Development, Lori Glaze:

GLAZE: Our flight operations team and our science team are ready, uh, for the first lunar flyby in more than 50 years.

The flyby will break Apollo 13's all-time distance record from Earth.

At closest approach the crew will come within four-thousand miles of the lunar surface, photographing parts of the far side no human eye has ever seen.

The crew, from inside their Orion capsule, will also experience a total solar eclipse.

Mission Control will lose contact for about 40 minutes while the crew passes behind the moon.

Glaze added that health experiments aboard the capsule are laying the groundwork for future missions:

GLAZE:  All of these human health experiment experiments are informing how we can keep our crews healthy on the longer missions that are coming up in the future.

Artemis II is slated to splash down in the Pacific near San Diego on Friday.

DHS funding » Homeland Security remains partially shut down this morning, as Congress returns for a new week with no funding vote in sight. Republican leaders have a two-track plan: Pass a Senate bill funding most of DHS now, then fund ICE and Border Patrol separately through budget reconciliation, bypassing Democrats entirely.

GOP Congressman Jimmy Patronis said Sunday:

PATRONIS:  We really need reconciliation to start first, and I think if reconciliation starts, we start to see the framework of it, then the members are gonna start to get more comfortable as we are trying to bring this all in for a landing.

The department has been without full funding for nearly 50 days after Democrats refused to fund immigration enforcement unless Republicans agreed to a list of demanded changes.

Trump signed a memo Friday to keep DHS paychecks flowing in the meantime. He wants the full funding package on his desk by June 1st.

Guthrie returns to Today Show » Today Show co-anchor Savannah Guthrie returns to the air this morning, two months after her 84-year-old mother was abducted from her Tucson-area home.

Ahead of her return, Guthrie delivered an Easter message, admitting she has felt "deep disappointment with God" since her mother's disappearance, but says she still believes:

GUTHRIE: Our faith gives us a spiritual conviction that we will be reborn, that God will redeem this pain, that every tear will be wiped away, that our Easter is coming.

That was a video message delivered to Good Shepherd Church in New York City.

Nancy Guthrie has been missing since February 1^st, with investigators finding bloodstains at the residence and multiple ransom notes demanding cryptocurrency.

The FBI remains involved. The Guthrie family has offered a $1 million-dollar reward for information leading to her safe recovery.

I'm Kent Covington.

Straight ahead: legal analysis of the landmark birthright citizenship case at the Supreme Court. Plus, the legacy left by Martin Luther King, Jr.

This is The World and Everything in It.

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s The World and Everything in It for this 6th day of April, 2026. We’re so glad you’ve joined us today. Good morning! I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. It’s time for Legal Docket.

What does it mean to be born a citizen of the United States?

That was the question at the Supreme Court last week—the justices taking up an issue that’s been bubbling up for more than a hundred years.

At stake: whether the Constitution guarantees citizenship to nearly everyone born on U.S. soil—or whether the government has the authority to draw tighter limits.

EICHER: That question lands at a moment of high immigration pressure. Federal data show record levels of migrant encounters at the southern border under the Biden administration—peaking at nearly two-and-a-half million in the year 2023. Immigration courts now face a backlog of millions of cases, plus asylum cases, with many claims taking years to resolve.

At the same time, the business of birth tourism figured into the argument. From Miami luxury suites for Russian elites to 500-plus companies operating in China, federal prosecutors say the scale is staggering. Testimony in Congress last month estimates three-quarters of a million and maybe twice that number of citizenships may be linked to those operations—with foreign adversaries gaming the system to build a block of dual-citizen voters who live, work, and remain loyal to interests overseas.

All of that raises the stakes: whether a Civil War–era constitutional rule still operates the same way in a very different world.

REICHARD: That question came to a head on the first day of President Trump’s second term.

He signed an executive order titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.” It says the Fourteenth Amendment does not extend citizenship to everyone born in the United States. Citizenship belongs only to those “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”

That order pertains to children born to mothers in the country unlawfully—or here lawfully but only temporarily, such as on student, work, or tourist visas. Those children under the order would not automatically receive U.S. citizenship if the father is not a citizen or lawful permanent resident.

EICHER: The issue now is the latest attempt to force clarity on the meaning and reach of the 14th Amendment.

To use the Latin lawyers so love: does America follow jus soli, the right of the soil? Or does it follow jus sanguinis, citizenship based on the nationality of your mom and dad?

This debate hasn’t always been as partisan as it is now.

Back in 1993, with President Bill Clinton in his first term, Democratic Senator Harry Reid said this on the Senate floor.

REID: No sane country would do that, right? …If you break our laws by entering our country without permission to give birth to a child, we reward that child with U.S. citizenship and guarantee a full access to all public and social services this society provides….

REICHARD: He later reversed that position as majority leader.

But the underlying question never went away.

Now it’s front and center at the Supreme Court, which must interpret one line from the Fourteenth Amendment: “All persons born…in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens.” 

It’s that second part, “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” that is in contention now.

Arguing for the government, Solicitor General John Sauer defended that reading of the Constitution:

SAUER: The Citizenship Clause was adopted just after the Civil War to grant citizenship to the newly freed slaves and their children, whose allegiance to the United States had been established by generations of domicile here. It did not grant citizenship to the children of temporary visitors or illegal aliens, who have no such allegiance.

He argued that automatic birthright citizenship creates practical consequences as well:

SAUER: Unrestricted birthright citizenship contradicts the practice of the overwhelming majority of modern nations. It demeans the priceless and profound gift of American citizenship. It operates as a powerful pull factor for illegal immigration and rewards illegal aliens who not only violate the immigration laws but also jump in front of those who follow the rules.

EICHER: As background: the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted after the Supreme Court’s infamous Dred Scott decision, which denied citizenship to Black Americans. The constitutional amendment guaranteed citizenship to former slaves and their children.

Months earlier, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866. That law said anyone born in the United States—and “not subject to any foreign power”—was a citizen.

REICHARD: And that’s where the dispute begins:

Whether those two phrases—“not subject to any foreign power” and “subject to the jurisdiction thereof”—mean the same thing.

More than 150 years later, the Court still hasn’t given a definitive answer

EICHER: The Trump administration takes the position that they do mean the same thing. That both phrases exclude children of parents without permanent legal status in the United States.

At oral argument, the justices sought to find out what “jurisdiction” really means.

Justice Clarence Thomas asked whether the clause assumes something more permanent—like a home or domicile:

THOMAS: …the Citizenship Clause refers not just to national citizenship but also to state citizenship. Are we to have two different definitions for those?

REICHARD: Sauer responded the clause assumes people are domiciled in this country and not merely passing through.

But Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed back to the historical debates: (Note, for the sake of clarity, I have edited some of the exchanges.)

SOTOMAYOR: So what do you do? During the debates of the 1866 Civil Rights Act and of the Fourteenth Amendment ….later…and the fact that the proponents of both acts said everyone who's born in the U.S. will be citizens?

REICHARD: Justice Elena Kagan wondered whether the government’s argument rests on narrow, unusual examples:

KAGAN: Most of your brief is about not about illegal aliens. Most of your brief is about people who are just temporarily in the country, where there was quite clearly an experience of, an understanding of, that they were going to be temporary inhabitants. And your whole theory of the case is built on that group.

EICHER: Chief Justice John Roberts echoed that concern:

ROBERTS: You obviously put a lot of weight on "subject to the jurisdiction thereof," but the examples you give to support that strike me as very quirky, you know, children of ambassadors, children of enemies during a hostile invasion, children on warships, and then you expand it to a whole class of illegal aliens are --are here in the country.

I'm not quite sure how you can get to that big group from such tiny and sort of idiosyncratic examples….

Justice Samuel Alito took a different approach—asking how old constitutional language applies to new realities.

ALITO: And what we're dealing with here is something that was basically unknown at the time when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted, which is illegal immigration. So how do we deal with that situation when we have a general rule?

REICHARD: Justice Alito compared it to applying old laws to new technology. Merely because a thing didn’t exist at the time the law was written doesn’t mean the law cannot apply in the future.

And that raised an even deeper question running through the case: Is the Constitution fixed? Or does its meaning extend to circumstances the framers could never foresee?

Justice Brett Kavanaugh asked directly:

KAVANAUGH: Are the exceptions --you've used the word "closed" many times --frozen, or do we reason by analogy to the exceptions that existed based on things that were unforeseen at the time? ….I'm thinking in particular about the non-citizens unlawfully in the country, not the temporary part but the non-citizens unlawfully in the country.

EICHER: On the other side is a nationwide class of challengers.

The lead plaintiff is known only as “Barbara”, a woman from Honduras living in New Hampshire and seeking asylum.

She argues her U.S.-born child is a citizen—and that status matters for access to benefits like SNAP, Medicaid, and Social Security.

Their lawyer, Cecilia Wang of the ACLU:

WANG: Ask any American what our citizenship rule is and they'll tell you, everyone born here is a citizen alike. That rule was enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment to put it out of the reach of any government official to destroy... 30 years after ratification, this court held that the 14th amendment embodies the English common law rule. Virtually everyone born on US soil is subject to its jurisdiction and is a citizen. It excludes only those cloaked with the fiction of extraterritoriality, because they are subject to another sovereign’s jurisdiction even when they’re in the United States. A closed set of exceptions to an otherwise universal rule.

REICHARD: She argued the Fourteenth Amendment is a broad rule with very narrow exceptions, and she leaned on a 1898 Supreme Court decision in US v Wong Kim Ark. That held that a child born on US soil to non-citizen parents, albeit parents here legally, was still a citizen. Case settled, she argued.

EICHER: But Justice Alito wasn’t so sure about applying those facts to this case. He offered a hypothetical:

ALITO: "Not subject to any foreign power” is pretty straightforward … A boy is born here to an Iranian father who has entered the country illegally. That boy is automatically an Iranian national at birth, and he has a duty to provide military service to the Iranian government. Is he not subject to any foreign power?

WANG: Not within the meaning of the 1866 Act, Justice Alito ... .What the Framers meant by the phrase "not subject to any foreign power" was referring to the ambassador exception. …later…

ALITO: Well, ordinary public --ordinary public meaning of that would certainly encompass that boy, would it not?

Justice Amy Coney Barrett raised a very practical concern, reflecting her years as a professor of civil procedure:

BARRETT: What if you don't know who the parents are?...later…How would it work? How would you adjudicate these cases? You're not going to know at the time of birth for some people whether they have the intent to stay or not…

REICHARD: Chief Justice Roberts asked about birth tourism. Sauer was ready for it:

SAUER: Here's a fact about it that I think is striking. Media reported as early as 2015 that based on Chinese media reports, there are 500 --500 birth tourism companies in the People's Republic of China whose business is to bring people here to give birth and return to that nation.

[LATER] ROBERTS: Well, it certainly wasn't a problem in the 19th century.

SAUER: No, but, of course, we're --we're in a new world now, as Justice Alito pointed out to, where 8 billion people are one plane ride away from having a --a child who's a U.S. citizen.

ROBERTS: Well, it's a new world. It's the same Constitution. (Laughter.)

One thing to note: Nobody would lose birthright citizenship who’s already gained it, but future people won’t get it under this principle. The executive order applies only to births after February 20, 2025. And even that is blocked by lower courts right now.

Maybe the debate will push Congress to do something about people taking advantage of a principle designed for another context.

ROBERTS: Thank you, counsel, General, the case is submitted.

And that’s this week’s Legal Docket!

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It:

The Monday Moneybeat.

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s time now to talk business, markets and the economy with financial analyst and advisor David Bahnsen. David heads up the wealth management firm the Bahnsen Group, and he is here now. Good morning to you.

DAVID BAHNSEN: Good morning, Nick, good to be with you.

EICHER: Well, let’s begin with the obvious headline—with energy stocks on a big run and oil prices jumping on the Iran situation last week (and today’s going to be highly interesting and important, given the rescue of the pilot and the warning the president gave).

Now, of course, we’ve seen this before, where geopolitical events can move prices pretty quickly in one direction or another. But it’s really tempting to treat energy as purely a geopolitical story—and you argue in Dividend Café that’s exactly the wrong way to think about it.

Tell us why.

BAHNSEN: Well, what I’m acknowledging is that some of the recent move is obviously connected to the tailwind of what is happening in Iran, and that there are geopolitical events from time to time that can either serve as headwinds or tailwinds to the energy story.

But then you become a trader, and you become, in your investment thesis, someone enslaved to the headlines. The headlines are extremely volatile and unpredictable themselves, including in this very moment we find ourselves in with the Middle Eastern tensions. This thing could go on for four more months. It could be done in four more hours, and has a whole lot of possibilities in between those things.

And believing that energy investment at a high level, just broadly defined energy investment, is a good or bad investment based on whether or not there’s a supply shock out of a geopolitical turmoil event, I think is very dangerous, and I think it misses a much larger point about the way God made the world and the way economic growth comes to be.

That essentially what we have properly understood historically, physically, and certainly economically—and again, I tie all these things, Nick, to creationally—is that economic growth comes from energy being transformed, and that as it is transformed, things in the physical universe become more valuable, that it unlocks value.

And we see this in a very obvious and profound level with coal in the industrial revolution, and we understand what electricity has meant, but we can talk about it with oil and gas. And there are unbelievable world-changing events in the energy world that have come from oil and gas.

But by and large, I really believe we need to understand the importance not just in a moment where there’s a supply shock in the Strait of Hormuz, but permanently understand. Because in times of peace, in times of geopolitical bliss, there are people that have spent the last six to ten years trying to take away our abundance of energy, and what that means is take away economic growth.

And so I’m connecting a lot of dots here, but none of them are unimportant.

EICHER: Absolutely, and there’s a lot to get to, so let me move to the jobs report. I actually pulled a year’s worth of these government reports—just to try to put together a coherent, fuller picture.

And the March jobs report headline that came out Friday looked strong in the sense of beating expectations—but last month was highly negative, and we’ve been talking for a while about labor shortages and participation issues. So instead of my take, let me ask for yours—when you zoom out over that year, where do you think we really are right now in the jobs picture?

BAHNSEN: Well, there—look, the labor participation force and the JOLTS, the job openings, those are two very different things, although they can overlap to some degree.

But the labor participation force declining is a very long-term story that has played out over the last 17 years and shows no signs of getting better, and does show plenty of signs of worsening. And it just simply refers to the amount of people that become kind of permanently removed from the labor force.

The job openings, when they get higher than what people are looking for, jobs that may not necessarily be about labor participation force, but it may be about a surge of employers needing part-time work, needing temporary work, or just hiring a bunch of new positions.

In 2022 you saw a lot of that, but remember there were a lot of layoffs in the COVID moment, and so out of the reopening of our economy, it increased a lot of demand for labor, and then you had a limited supply—whether or not that was permanently out of the labor force, or a reflection of all the people that took government money in 2020 and 21 and the extended unemployment and so forth. There was a mismatch there that was very problematic.

So most of my focus, professionally and ideologically, is on these longer-term issues that bother me a great deal.

But I think you’re asking about right now, where are we? And the jobs report that came out Friday on the holiday had a headline of being above expectations, which was true.

It pains me to hear 178,000 being an above-expectation number, because we really want to see 200 to 250 as kind of the baseline.

But then you look under the hood, and it was no less than three reports I read this weekend all indicating that the entirety of the upside surprise came from the very sectors that are the most often revised. And I think that this report is probably set up for a future downward revision.

But any headline of higher-than-expected job growth, considering the vulnerability that we’ve been in and so forth, I think is a good thing.

And the weekly jobless claims continue to not be moving higher, indicating that we still seem frozen where there is not great new hiring, but there is not yet great firing.

And that’s the issue that I just pray doesn’t break, because once employers decide the economy is precarious enough, we need to start laying people off, that obviously is generally the precondition to recession.

EICHER: There was not a ton of commentary on this jobs report and one of the few I saw was in The Wall Street Journal. It made the point, digging into the March jobs numbers, that one of the bright spots was the decline in government jobs. Meaning that to get to the positive—private, productive-sector jobs had to outpace government. Maybe I’m just looking for bright spots there, but do you find yourself agreeing with that argument?

BAHNSEN: Yeah, but let’s be in the right context—I do.

I mean, there’s two sides to the coin. If all you had in job growth was governmental jobs, like in a real hyper-Keynesian moment, then that should be less encouraging than otherwise would be. And likewise, if a lot of the job losses are highlighted in government jobs, that should be less encouraging than otherwise from the vantage point of productivity.

However, in this particular case, a lot of the governmental jobs are people taking early retirement, not moving into the productive parts of the economy.

And you also then do see the positive job growth that’s offsetting it, largely in hospitality and food and beverage and other service spaces that are lower wage, technology.

And then this is a thing that just the tariff fans should be so unbelievably chastened by—is the manufacturing jobs just continue to be going down, not up.

EICHER: We haven’t talked about the Fed in a little bit, so I took a look at the FedWatch futures—looking forward across the rest of this calendar year 2026. And I have to say, I was surprised to see markets essentially pricing in zero rate cuts at all for 2026.

Do you actually agree with that—that the base case right now is just a hold on an interest rate we all know remains restrictive?

BAHNSEN: Yeah, it’s kind of a symmetrical—where the base case in the futures market continues to be that there will be no change. There’s slightly better than 10% that there will be one cut, and slightly less than 10% that there will be an increase.

And so it’s essentially the futures pricing and the idea of it all staying the same.

It’s extremely rare for me to be taking a position outside of the futures, but I continue to believe that Chairman Warsh—at whatever his first meeting is, the timing of which is a little unclear right now because of what Senator Tillis is going to do to hold up the nomination until they stop this nonsense against Chairman Powell—but I still think Warsh will end up getting installed around the end of the May meeting, going into early June.

And I honestly, Nick, would just be shocked if he doesn’t cut rates at his first meeting. I’d be shocked. But the futures are saying he’s not going to.

EICHER: But he’s got to have the votes. He can’t just do it by himself—

BAHNSEN: Well, that’s theoretically true, but there is no precedent at all for the committee going against the chair.

So that is right—it would be a pretty interesting thing, what it would mean to the legitimacy and the mandate of the chairmanship, if in his very first meeting he was voting with the minority when it’s never happened in Fed history.

So we may get a little more Fed drama. For those of us that have felt like we were kind of past it the last couple of months, we may be getting more of it. We’ll see.

EICHER: Yeah, we will.

David Bahnsen is the founder, managing partner and chief investment officer of the Bahnsen Group. Critically, he writes at DividendCafe.com and regularly for us at WORLD Opinions.

David, have a great week. I hope you had a wonderful Easter and rejoicing in the truth that Christ has risen.

BAHNSEN: Amen. Thanks so much, Nick.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Finally today, the WORLD History Book.

This weekend marked the anniversary of the date that Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. The tragic end to his life marked a change in the civil rights movement. And nearly six decades later, some still wonder if justice was served.

WORLD’s Mary Muncy reports.

MARY MUNCY: In 1968, Reverend Samuel “Billy” Kyles was standing on a balcony in Memphis with Martin Luther King, Jr. when he heard a shot.

SAMUEL “BILLY” KYLES: I thought there was a firecracker and I didn’t see him and my first reaction was that he’s clowning again. He’s feigning like he’s been shot.

He spoke with CNN in 2011.

KYLES: And then I saw his shoes, sticking out from under the railing.

POLICE RADIO: We have information that King has been shot at the Lorraine.

When police arrived, they asked where the shot came from, and everyone pointed to the hotel across the street.

On the way to the scene, Memphis Police Captain Jewel Ray saw a bundle on the street by the hotel. People in the record store nearby told Ray…

RAY: A white fellow had dropped it there and then had gotten in a white mustang and drove off.

There was a rifle, a case, and some underwear wrapped in a green bedspread. When Ray made it to the hotel, he saw the screen knocked out of a bathroom window with a clear line of sight to King’s balcony. He radioed to other officers.

POLICE RADIO: Information we have on the subject, he’s a young white male, well dressed. Possible in a late model style white mustang.

It was too late. The shooter escaped.

That night, cities across the country erupted into riots. Some of them turned violent.

President Lyndon B. Johnson addressed the nation.

LYNDON JOHNSON: America is shocked and saddened by the brutal slaying tonight of Dr. Martin Luther King. I ask every citizen to reject the blind violence that has struck Dr. King. Who lived by non-violence.

More than 150,000 people gathered in Atlanta for King’s funeral. They packed King’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, and filled the streets outside.

FUNERAL: Fear though not for I am with thee, be not dismayed for I am thy God.

In the investigation, police dusted the rifle and the room near the common bathroom for prints and matched them to escaped convict, James Earl Ray. They also found a radio with his prisoner number on it, and a newspaper showing King’s schedule.

Police searched for Ray for two months before they found him at Heathrow Airport in London.

Ray confessed to everything and pleaded guilty, but he recanted just three days later. Saying a man named “Raoul” had framed him.

The courts never gave that much weight… and sentenced him to 99 years in prison. He didn’t get a trial because of his guilty plea.

But King’s son Dexter and some others believe that there was a larger conspiracy at play and that Ray is innocent.

In 1997, Dexter met with Ray. NBC published the conversation.

DEXTER KING: I believe you, and my family believes you and we are going to do everything in our power to try and make sure that justice will prevail.

Some people believe that federal agencies like the CIA and FBI conspired to kill King because he had too much political power. They say “Raoul” coordinated the attack and lured a vulnerable Ray to be the fall guy.

But neither King’s death nor the lingering questions over culpability have quelled his legacy.

TAYLOR BRANCH: By the time he was killed, the whole future of the United States had changed as a result of the civil rights movement.

Taylor Branch is a historian who wrote a book on King’s life. Branch says King was born in a world where black people were invisible and although that frustrated him deeply, he always called for non-violent action.

BRANCH: His message was that race relations in the United States have been governed by violence. You know, slavery was purely violence.

But King said America is a nation of politics and voting instead of violence and that we should follow Christ’s example of rejecting it.

BRANCH: So Dr King kind of put one foot in the Scripture and one foot in the Constitution, equal souls and equal votes, and that that message kind of set a lot of change in motion, not just for between black and white, but between men and women.

After his death, Branch says non-violence became “passe.” The Black Panthers gained popularity as a militant group aiming to end police brutality against black people."

And while some elected officials tried to support King’s vision for equal rights, others perpetuated many of the unjust systems. It would take years of slow work to bring many of those systems forward and bring America closer to King’s dream.

Those who knew King say he didn’t expect to live past 30—and he would gladly give his life to the cause.

He gave his last speech in Memphis the night before he died.

MARTIN LUTHER KING: I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And 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.

That’s this week’s World History Book, I’m Mary Muncy.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Tomorrow: the latest on the war in Iran. And a story of escape: how one woman got away from homelessness, meth addiction, and exploitation. That and more tomorrow.

I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

The World and Everything in It comes to you from WORLD Radio. WORLD’s mission is biblically objective journalism that informs, educates, and inspires.

The Bible says: “Let the heavens praise your wonders, O LORD, your faithfulness in the assembly of the holy ones! For who in the skies can be compared to the LORD? Who among the heavenly beings is like the LORD, a God greatly to be feared in the council of the holy ones, and awesome above all who are around him? O LORD God of hosts, who is mighty as you are, O LORD, with your faithfulness all around you? ” —Psalm 89:5-8

Go now in grace and peace.

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