45
years ago this evening Dr. King was in Memphis, TN to stand in solidarity with
striking sanitation workers. It was the last public speech he gave.
The
next day he was murdered by an assassin's bullet at his hotel.
Enclosed
here is the text of the speech.
Instead
of the text of the speech, I will offer this commentary. With the recent rapid and
sometimes exponential movement in LGBT Rights in the last 20 years, Rachel
Maddow offered this observation on her program last week:
We're
still seeing Dr. King's light to this day. And the many Civil Rights leaders
and other history makers that stood for change. Their light still shines on us
despite their physical presence is no longer with us. I can see them all
gathering in some meeting place (a restaurant, a bar, someone's living room,
campfire, car on a long road trip, think tank) in Heaven/The Great Beyond/some
other plane of existence and talking about what is going on down here.
It is important to look back on the sacrifices and efforts that all kinds
of people made to get us to where we are today and learn from the lessons of
the past in order to move forward to creating "that more perfect
Union" and ensuring that we live up to the ideas we proclaim so loudly in our
founding documents.
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