45th Anniversary of Dr. MLK, Jr's Assassination

It's now 45 years since that awful April 4, 1968 day that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr was assassinated in Memphis, TN at 6:01 PM CDT.  

I was four weeks from celebrating my sixth birthday at the time and because of that assassin's bullet Dr King unfortunately would not live to celebrate his 40th.

2013 finds us in the interesting and ironic convergence of this year that we mark the somber 45th anniversary of his assassination also being the 50th anniversaries of Dr King writing the famous Letter From Birmingham City Jail, the Birmingham Campaign, the March on Washington and the 'I Have A Dream' Speech, and the bombing of Birmingham's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.

And yes, we still have an African-American president and his family living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

There are times I wonder where this country would be if the Drum Major For Justice had been able to live through the 70's and 80's.  We know his stance on the Vietnam War and he was increasingly focused on economic issues..  What would he have commented on in terms of the issues of the 1970's and 1980's?

Renee of Womanist Musings and I discussed that during his birthday weekend.

He definitely would have praised the Nixon Administration for ending the American involvement in the Vietnam War but called them out over Watergate.  He would have decried the Yom Kippur War, the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and probably criticized Ronald Reagan for his Evil Empire rhetoric that dangerously increased Cold War tensions between the US and USSR to the point that as we now know World War III almost got jumped off.   

And what would Dr. King have said about Stonewall and the LGBT rights movement?  The ERA and the rise of a conservative movement that disingenuously hid behind the Bible to roll back human rights?.

There's not too many things I agree with Tavis Smiley about these days, but there is one statement I'm in lock step agreement with him on in terms of him stating that Dr. King was the greatest American our people have ever produced.

And the memorial to him in Washington DC is an exclamation point to that..