April 4,1968 Was The Last Day Of Martin Luther King Jr.'s Life!

It's been exactly 41 years since MLK Jr. was assasinated.A lot has changed in four decades.Martin Luther King Jr. was a civil & human rights martyr who did not die in vain.His widely shared dream of commonality & equality among the races has been partially realized with the election of Barack Obama.Americans are still slowly progressing towards making Martin Luther King Jr.'s words an absolute reality.Here's more on what this great man stood for from HNN:

"In late March and early April 1968, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. devoted his organizing talents to a drive to bring the nation's poor people to Washington, D.C. for a series of massive nonviolent demonstrations. King's "Poor People's Campaign" would attempt to unify African Americans, Latinos, and lower-income whites in pressing the Johnson Administration and Congress in an election year to enact a $30 billion-a-year domestic "Marshall Plan" to alleviate poverty. King hoped his latest March on Washington would sustain the momentum of the maturing civil rights movement by broadening its goals to include class grievances. He was also searching for a nonviolent alternative to the wave of riots that had ripped through black neighborhoods in the preceding years. Although King understood the underlying social causes for the uprisings, he believed they were "misguided" as forms of political protest.

With the Poor People's Campaign, King said: "There must be some structural changes now," and "a radical re-ordering of priorities" including "a de-escalation and final stopping of the war in Vietnam and an escalation of the war against poverty and racism here at home." King linked poverty with the waste of resources on the war. (Today, with $10 billion a month currently being squandered in Iraq, King's critique of the Vietnam War still resonates.) The Poor People's Campaign brought together clergy, labor unions, civil rights groups, and college students to create what King hoped to be a lasting coalition with blacks and poor whites. He promised to launch the campaign by bringing a core group of "about 3,000 people to Washington from fifteen various communities," including the entire impoverished hamlet of Marks, Mississippi.

The poor people and their allies would occupy the public spaces of Washington for "at least sixty days, or however long we feel it necessary," King promised. He hoped it would be reminiscent of the March on Washington of 1963. He said the culminating event would take place on June 15 with a massive rally. "We want to provide an opportunity once more for thousands, hundreds of thousands of people to come to Washington," he said. "We hope that all of our friends will go out of their way to make that a big day, indeed the largest march that has ever taken place in the city of Washington."

King said explicitly on several occasions that forging a class-based movement was the goal of the campaign. The "poor white" had been put into a position, he wrote, "where through blindness and prejudice, he is forced to support his oppressors, and the only thing he has going for him is the false feeling that he is superior because his skin is white. And he can't hardly eat and make ends meet week in and week out." (END OF EXCERPT)Read the rest of this great article here.