Today’s national holiday marks the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr., who would have been 76 on Saturday. King’s legacy more than three decades after his assassination in Memphis, Tenn., on April 4, 1968, at the age of 39, lives on despite the contempt shown by a majority of American voters in electing a right-wing president who is about to be inaugurated and whose reactionary policies oppose everything King stood for.
Watch King giving his greatest address, the “I have a dream” speech of Aug. 28, 1963, delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Listen to his peerless “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” of April 16, 1963, in which he defends direct-action nonviolence, explains its principles, expresses his disappointment with white moderates and reminds us all, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” (See the original typed document.)
