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
Today 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:- MLK and King James: Vox’s Dylan Scott details how LeBron Raymone James has become a force for racial justice — and America's most socially and politically influential athlete since Muhammad Ali.
·
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