Wednesday, April 04, 2018

Remembering the King


There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.
— Graham Greene, who died on this date in 1991 

Remembering MLK

King coverToday is the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis. Here are Wednesday's front page from the New York Daily News, focusing on King's fight against policy brutality, and selected readings from various sites:
·        Of King, the Rev. Jesse Jackson says his struggle for economic justice had made him a polarizing figure in his final years. "How he lived is why he died," Jackson writes in the Times. "A man of love, he died hated by many,"
·        The Atlantic has this thread highlighting stories from its special edition on King and his legacy.
·        In a podcast with Jonathan Capehart, Rep. John Lewis said “I just felt like something had died in all us” on April 4, 1968.
·        At the New Yorker, Rich Benjamin wrote that the assassination, and the riots that followed, stoked white paranoia and bolstered and radicalized the National Rifle Association.
“It is either damning irony or inspiring continuity — or, possibly, both — that the fiftieth anniversary of King’s death falls amid the largest antigun-violence mobilization that we have seen since he departed,” writes the New Yorker’s Jelani Cobb. Cobb’s essay ends with the appearance before hundreds of thousands of people in Washington last month of King’s granddaughter, 9-year-old Yolanda Renee King