Forty years after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the civil-rights groups he invigorated have seen a steep drop in membership, budgets, and prestige, The Washington Post reports.

Once-vital groups like the Congress of Racial Equality and the Rev. King’s own Southern Christian Leadership Conference are nearly bankrupt. (The former briefly had its power shut off.) Even the largest civil-rights group, the NAACP, has shrunk to 300,000 members, down from the 500,000 dues-paying members it long claimed.

The reasons for the decline are myriad. Many groups designed to serve black professionals have sprung up to replace the old-time groups. Organizations like the Black Panthers made traditional civil-rights groups seem timid. And most of the groups were slow to adopt innovative fund-raising techniques in the past few decades.

However, the biggest factor may have been civil-rights groups’ success. They long ago won their big battles, securing voting rights and desegregating schools. In addition, the marches and protests they pioneered have been adopted by newer groups, and the organizing and leadership roles of the original groups no longer seem as necessary to black Americans, the newspaper says.

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