Dr. Martin Luther King Jr Day Today, Take A Moment To Remember, Reflect And Honor His True Legacy

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr Day Today, Take A Moment To Remember, Reflect And Honor His True Legacy

The third Monday in January has been designated as a Federal holiday in honor
of the birthday of Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr.
who was born January 15, 1929

 

and assassinated April 4, 1968.

Dr. King is remembered and honored for many civil rights activities including
his 1963
“Letter from a Birmingham Jail”.

An excerpt:

… A law is unjust if it is inflicted on a minority that, as a result of
being denied the right to vote, had no part in enacting or devising the law.
Who can say that the legislature of Alabama which set up that state’s
segregation laws was democratically elected? Throughout Alabama all sorts of
devious methods are used to prevent Negroes from becoming registered voters,
and there are some counties in which, even though Negroes constitute a
majority of the population, not a single Negro is registered. Can any law
enacted under such circumstances be considered democratically structured?

Sometimes a law is just on its face and unjust in it’s application. For
instance, I have been arrested on a charge of parading without a permit. Now,
there is nothing wrong in having an ordinance which requires a permit for a
parade. But such an ordinance becomes unjust when it is used to maintain
segregation and to deny citizens the First-Amendment privilege of peaceful
assembly and protest….

The full text of
Letter From A Birmingham Jail
is here and a short
excerpt of audio below.

Here’s an excerpt of Dr. King’s last speech on the night before his
asassination –
I’ve Been To The Mountain Top.

Politcio
has an excellent article on the last years of Dr. King’s life.

… Almost 50 years after his death, we remember MLK as the transcendent
figure who helped lift the South out of Jim Crow. We also remember him as
almost preternaturally calm in the face of great pressure and danger. He was
indeed all of these things. But the passage of time has obscured his
dimensionality. In the last years of his life, King expanded his vision beyond
the former Confederacy and took on a broader struggle to dismantle America’s
jigsaw edifice of racial and economic discrimination—a struggle that took him
deep into northern states and cities, where onetime allies became bitter
enemies. He did so even as he strained to keep a fractious civil rights
movement unified, and in the face of unremitting sabotage from federal
authorities.

He was a young man, still in his 30s—foisted onto the national stage with
actors many years or decades his senior, suspect in the eyes of both younger
and older civil rights leaders—and the burdens of leadership took their toll
on him….

Take a look at this ery interesting thread below – click through to read in it’s entirety.

Take a moment today to remember Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the good work
he accomplished to make our country a better place.



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