To clarify, thanks, Michael for the reminder.

No thanks for the dis in the process.

I've told this story here before.

I was pregnant, 6 weeks out from delivery. Joe was home on leave and was about to be shopped overseas. We were in the Roman Room.

Ruby (longtime waitress there) came by and announced that MLK had been shot. A bunch of frat boys in the booth behind us started celebrating, calling him Martin Luther Koon. I became increasingly upset, sad and angry, and challenged them. Joe asked me to calm down, since he didn't want to have to fight them on my behalf, and hustled me out of there. Can't remember who was with us, but I'll never, ever forget that night. Joe was afraid I'd go into premature labor.

I'm sure there were some jokes told about the insane pregnant woman in the bar.

King's assassination must have taken place during or just prior to a Knox County Schools break of some sort because my sister and I, along with our parents, were en route a day or two later to visit relatives in Arkansas. At my carsick mom's request, Dad's habit was to make the drive over two days, always spending a night in Memphis.

After we'd checked in at a local Holiday Inn, Dad wanted to drive us over to the Lorraine Hotel, just to pay our respects in some manner. He got directions at the front desk, but as it turned out we couldn't get anywhere near the place, mobbed as it still was with news crews and throngs of pedestrians.

We parked the car and walked several blocks, among probably the biggest crowd of people black and white together that I'd ever seen. When we reached the hotel--or a building across the street from it, actually--we saw that the door to his hotel room was wrapped in orchid-colored paper and bore a wreath of purple flowers. There was no commemorative program of any sort going on, of course, but people took pictures of the hotel door and just stood quietly, some of them crying.

On returning to our motel room, Dad expressed regret that we hadn't packed a candle. When JFK had been assassinated a few years earlier, he and Mom had lined the fireplace mantle with candles, keeping them burning daily from the day of the president's death through the day of his burial.

Great point Kaplan. What gives "liberals a bad name" is their hypocrisy. Though MLK died fighting for racial and economic justice, "liberals" have been busy undermining King's sacrifice for the past thirty-five years, while at the same time pontificating in the name of MLK. He would be appalled at the way his name has been co-opted by the establishment and he would not support Obama.

Liberals haven't just forgot about the death of MLK, they've forgotten why he died and, most likely, don't even want to know because if they really understood Dr. King's message, they would have to be ashamed of themselves for not just dropping the torch but for pouring water on it. Quite an appropriate thing to ponder on Easter Sunday, I would argue.

Always remember that neoliberalism is not possible without Democrats. Adolph Reed elaborates in his article "Nothing Left":

"Most telling, though, is the reinvention of the Clinton Administration as a halcyon time of progressive success. Bill Clinton’s record demonstrates, if anything, the extent of Reaganism’s victory in defining the terms of political debate and the limits of political practice. A recap of some of his administration’s greatest hits should suffice to break through the social amnesia. Clinton ran partly on a pledge of “ending welfare as we know it”; in office he both presided over the termination of the federal government’s sixty-year commitment to provide income support for the poor and effectively ended direct federal provision of low-income housing. In both cases his approach was to transfer federal subsidies—when not simply eliminating them—from impoverished people to employers of low-wage labor, real estate developers, and landlords. He signed into law repressive crime bills that increased the number of federal capital offenses, flooded the prisons, and upheld unjustified and racially discriminatory sentencing disparities for crack and powder cocaine. He pushed NAFTA through over strenuous objections from labor and many congressional Democrats. He temporized on his campaign pledge to pursue labor-law reform that would tilt the playing field back toward workers, until the Republican takeover of Congress in 1995 gave him an excuse not to pursue it at all. He undertook the privatization of Sallie Mae, the Student Loan Marketing Association, thereby fueling the student-debt crisis.

Notwithstanding his administration’s Orwellian folderol about “reinventing government,” his commitment to deficit reduction led to, among other things, extending privatization of the federal meat-inspection program, which shifted responsibility to the meat industry—a reinvention that must have pleased his former Arkansas patron, Tyson Foods, and arguably has left its legacy in the sporadic outbreaks and recalls that suggest deeper, endemic problems of food safety in the United States. His approach to health-care reform, like Barack Obama’s, was built around placating the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, and its failure only intensified the blitzkrieg of for-profit medicine.

In foreign policy, he was no less inclined than Reagan or George H.W. Bush to engage in military interventionism. Indeed, counting his portion of the Somali operation, he conducted nearly as many discrete military interventions as his two predecessors combined, and in four fewer years. Moreover, the Clinton Administration initiated the “extraordinary rendition” policy, under which the United States claims the right to apprehend individuals without charges or public accounting so that they can be imprisoned anywhere in the world (and which the Obama Administration has explicitly refused to repudiate). Clinton also increased American use of “privatized military services”—that is, mercenaries...

An equal longer-term danger, however, is the likelihood that we will find ourselves with no critical politics other than a desiccated leftism capable only of counting, parsing, hand-wringing, administering, and making up “Just So” stories about dispossession and exploitation recast in the evocative but politically sterile language of disparity and diversity. This is neo liberalism’s version of a left. Radicalism now means only a very strong commitment to anti-discrimination, a point from which Democratic liberalism has not retreated. Rather, it’s the path Democrats have taken in retreating from a commitment to economic justice."

(link...)

See also:
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And as we should remember, economic justice became the focus of King's movement - and then he was murdered:

"Do you know that most of the poor people in our country are working everyday? They are making wages so low that they cannot begin to function in the mainstream of the economic life of our nation. These are facts which must be seen. And it is criminal to have people working on a full-time basis and a full-time job getting part-time income."

-Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
March 18, 1968, Memphis, Tennessee

"There is nothing new about poverty. What is new is that we now have the techniques and the resources to get rid of poverty. The real question is whether we have the will."

-Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
March 31, 1968, Washington, D.C.

Kaplan, what gives you a bad name is the way you deal with actual people.Take the people here who you use for your silly rants.What kept you from just posting that it was the anniversary of Dr. King's death? Supposedly nobody else having posted it reflects badly on liberals who read this. So post it yourself at the appropriate time.Don't hover about and put something up trashing the readers of this blog..I still can't get over what you pulled on Ashley. You are the guy who whines about movies not being shown here but you can't be bothered to attend an incredible festival. You would rather post a link to something negative and untrue.

You give phony Marxists a bad name.

MLK understood the machinations of American politics in a way that is apparently foreign to some on this forum. I believe it to be a nearly obvious truth that he would disagree with some of Obama's positions and would push him further on other positions. However, it is beyond ludicrous to suggest that given the current political landscape, he would not be a supporter of Obama. Perhaps it is time for someone to revisit their dictionary and thesaurus. "Support" is not the same as "worship". "Support" does not mean "Agree 100% with every word and action." I had some issues with some of Clinton's positions and actions. I have some disagreement, sometimes severe disagreement, with Obama. Still, I have to acknowledge that both of them have moved the ball forward. That is a good thing.

Any respectable engineer will tell you that perfect is the enemy of good enough. MLK was a smart enough man to know just how true that is. There are no perfect politicians out there that I can see. I wish Obama was better but, given the options, MLK and I would and do choose him.

It's kinda funny these days how conservatives keep trying to claim MLK.

"He was a Republican."

Well, not really. Daddy King was a Republican, but that was before the Southern Strategy and the Dixiecrats hijacked the party of Lincoln.

"He was anti-abortion."

Well, not really. (link...)

"He and Reagan were friends."

(link...)

I agree with Omari. A simple "On this day in history" posting would have been tasteful and appropriate. Many of my friends on Facebook did indeed do just that. Instead this travesty is merely another invitation to every troll and his a$$hole sister to lie about liberals.

This is the most ironic thread on KV in a long time.

First, I have been an active, outspoken, truth-telling Liberal all my life. I walked past JFK's bier as a young Navy wife, and didn't have the money to attend the March on Washington tho' we lived in D.C. at the time. And just so you know. LIBERALS have not GIVEN UP. And to haters like Cornell West or that 'Reed,Jr. person' to claim they are 'experts' is a waste of space. It is just allowing two more President Obama Haters to imply that they know about and are experts on what it means to be counted as a liberal. It is...outrageous. West and his partner, Smiley, have trashed our President since before 2009. Why? This country has allowed labels, accusations, and lies to prevail about 'liberals" because the right wing media tells them to believe all their drivel. NOT one word is written about the last 3 GOP Presidents who waged 3 wars for no reason except to make billions for their military contractors and Dick Cheney! And not one word is uttered here about any thing positive those 3 did for the PEOPLE of any color, our American people. Without Liberal ideals we would not have Social Security, Medicare, Civil Rights, the Voting Rights Act, yes, even Roe v. Wade, the 40-hour work week, the right to belong to a Union, and the FREEDOM to worship a higher power or NOT. And no, we liberals will not give up nor go away....although the writers of this long and very inaccurate rant would hope so.