While many of us are celebrating Easter, Passover, baseball season or at least the fact that this long-coming spring is finally here, we also take a few minutes to remember that on April 4, 1968, Dr.Martin Luther King was assassinated at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee. He was in Tennessee helping the city’s sanitation workers to get a living wage and safer working conditions. That’s important to remember — all too often Dr, King is remembered for his fight for Civil Rights for African Americans — with little remembrance of his equally compelling and provocative work to eliminate poverty and also to end the Vietnam War. Take a look at Dr. King’s prophetic and moving speech the night before he was killed:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvPZKZErEfM[/youtube]
Bill Moyers and Michael Winship discuss the long term lack of progress in economic progress — as working families and poor communities are still those who bear the greatest brunt of bad economic policy.
Bob Herbert remembers not this speech, but the one Dr. King gave a year earlier at the Riverside Church, denouncing the US war in Vietnam. Herbert uses this speech to contemplate the symmetries with the current Afghanistan war. And to note that the morality of Dr. King’s position on the unjust Vietnam war doesn’t seem to have had any impact on those thinking about going to war and escalating the ones we are in.
Last, the Martin Luther King national memorial opens on the Mall on the fall of 2011.