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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