Our nation observed Martin Luther King Jr. Day on Monday and our communities have spent the past week observing the importance of the civil rights movement to our nation’s history and identity.

We are thankful for the volunteers and organizers who made the variety of events and commemorations a success.

As we reflect on the week, one point is clear to us: A little more than a half-century ago, segregation and discrimination had been entrenched in many communities and preserved by the leadership of those communities.

Earlier in the month, we noted that more than a 100 years ago, newspapers often were tools of political parties, political machines and other factions of leadership in cities and towns across America. Gradually, a new model that valued independence from such institutions and factions emerged.

We believe that growth, that transformation to greater independence in journalism allowed many Americans to better learn the degradation of segregation and discrimination. That transformation helped educate and inform voters about how these practices and philosophies undermined our American character and facilitated a shift towards greater respect for equality.

Civil rights leaders could share the stories of what Americans were facing and how discrimination and bigotry were denying them rights given by God. More and more journalists, independent of the political machines that had benefitted from discrimination for decades and that decades earlier ran many of the newspapers, could amplify those stories and give the average American a more accurate sense of how un-American segregation was.

The work that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders did was instrumental to improving our nation’s character. A media that wasn’t beholden to people of power and influence — the people working to stymie that improvement — played a critical role in that pursuit of a nation that more greatly values equality and liberty.