Word: kingness
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Martin Luther King Jr. was 26 years old when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus and 39 when he was murdered. Prodigies in music and math are familiar, but moral genius we typically associate with age. The gap between the brevity of King's life and its consequence is easy to state but hard to fathom, like the speed of light...
...were all young people," the Rev. Billy Kyles muses as he recalls the colleagues surrounding King that fatal evening in Memphis, Tenn. They were vivid, vigorous, virile young men. In his last hour alive, King and his friends had a pillow fight in his motel room. History records that his last thoughts encompassed gospel music, neckties, soul food and the high price of righteousness. "I'd rather be dead than afraid," this threat-haunted man explained to his friends that...
What would an older, time-tempered King think if he had lived to see today's world, with its black governors, black CEOs and Barack Obama? "You've made significant progress," King's close associate Andrew Young imagines him saying, "but you've still got a long...
...mark the 40th anniversary of his assassination at about 6 p.m. on April 4, 1968. King has been dead longer than he lived. All but four of the top aides with him that evening have joined their leader in death. Some might say King is frozen in time, forever urgent and perspiring, but no--he's beyond time. On the night before his death, he said, "Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place." That place is nothing, though, compared with the brief, fierce blaze of the genuine hero...
...think the big mess was not that King got killed. The big mess is that we didn't make sure that the man who was accused of killing him got his day in court. That summarily ended the nonviolent movement, when we would not stand up for the justice question...