MLK

50 years ago this afternoon we lost one of the most important Americans we will ever know. 

Probably one of the bravest men to ever walk in America.

A great preacher of the gospel.  

And now's a good time to brush up on the historical MLK rather than just remembering pop-culture MLK.

One of the most influential people of the 20th century named after one of the most influential people of the 16th century. Good show.

He was amazingly eloquent--- his speeches are like poetry.

A couple of years back I visited my brother in Huntsville AL.  On the drive home, I made a point to stop in Selma AL.  I wanted to walk over the Edmund Pettis bridge.  It had been 50 years since the Freedom marchers walked over this same pavement.  They were  headed to the other side......where the cops were waiting to beat the living Hell out of them....or worse.   MLK knew the cops would be waiting, so he arranged for the media to be there to record what he knew would happen.   He was sacrificing himself, and those who marched with him, to show the country how horrid the situation was in the South.  

When you get to the peak of the Edmund Pettis bridge  you still have a long way to walk before getting to the base of the bridge.  These incredibly brave people saw those cops waiting.......from about a 1/4 mile away.....yet they walked straight at them.   They knew they were going to get arrested, beat and maybe worse, but they kept on walking.

The bravery of those marchers and MLK is astounding.   They changed the world.  

He may have saved thousands of lives. I f you want to read something, The Taylor Branch three-volume set is the Gold Standard Biography.

Dr. MLK...he didn't go to all those years of seminary school for nothing! 

The story of the Edmund Pettus Bridge is both inspiring and heartbreaking. John Lewis was there --and is still here--and the photos from that day capture the brutality of that day. Sometimes it's pretty amazing just how cruelly we can treat each other. If anything, at least try to improve your own corner of the world. 

I learned today that he was the same age as I when he was killed. 39. He seemed so old and so wise when I was much younger, yet here I am...and there he was.

Being from Alabama I had relatives that lived a few miles from the bridge in Selma, and they watched the march from their front porch.  I remember my Mom talking about it quite a bit when I was younger.  There is some misunderstanding I think that MLK was not well supported by white people in the state at that time, but he did have a fair number behind him that knew segregation had to change.  Maybe they weren't huge numbers, but there were those that supported his mission. 

Unfortunately many that did not were lawmakers and enforcement, and not only Selma, but i think every time MLK went anywhere he knew he had a target on his back.  If you go back and listen to his speeches, I think there is a much in there that we need to listen and learn from today.  It's difficult to judge these things, but has there been any single person to do more for racial equality than MLK?  

Several years ago we visited the Henry Ford Museum where the Rosa Parks bus is on display. I'm sitting in the bus, just thinking about what she had to deal with and all that. It's a shrine in my mind and due the reverence . As I'm quietly sitting there taking it all in, I hear a sniffle from behind, so I turn around. There sits a black woman , probably in her early forties and there are tears running down her cheeks. I'll never forget that sight. It drove home the point of how important all the civil rights fighters were, and are, how far we've come, but how far we still have to go.

I was back there just this year, a couple of days after Martin Luther King Day. The fellow giving the history of the bus and it's resurrection was telling me that on MLK Day the museum set an all time attendance record and the line up to sit on the bus was a couple of hours long.  20,000 people went through it on one day.

GameboyRMH said:

And now's a good time to brush up on the historical MLK rather than just remembering pop-culture MLK.

That's a good read. I try to tell people about the other things that he was an activist for. I do think we've watered down a lot of what he did to a few certain events. If he was still alive I think we would've been even better off as a nation, obviously. But, not just for racial equality, but equality in other aspects like poverty, violence, sexuality, and police accountability. He was a powerful man and the govt and FBI feared him. It's sad he was only 39 when he was assassinated, so young.