When news broke that Donald Trump had been the target of an assassination attempt at a campaign rally last summer, Martin Luther King Jr.'s son was among the voices that decried the violence.
"Political violence has no place in our society and country," Martin Luther King III wrote in a post on X. "It undermines the foundations of our democracy."
The second child of the country's most prominent civil rights icon knows all too well the cost of political violence. When he was 10, his father was murdered on a Tennessee balcony and became part of a group of leaders, activists and Democratic politicians, assassinated in the 1960s.
“If President Kennedy and Medgar Evers and Malcolm X, Dad and Robert Kennedy had lived, we would be on a totally different trajectory,” King said. “These were people who were all cut down at a very critical time, not just in our nation, but in terms of where they were moving toward.”
Last July, Trump sustained an injury when the would-be assassin's bullet grazed his ear. He went on to win the election and resume the presidency.
