Today might be better for King Day

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=post&forum=389&go_ahead=doit

By Buddy Maupin
Thursday, April 3, 2008 10:49 PM CDT

In a January interview with Dr. Joseph Brown, Director of the Black Studies Department at Southern Illinois University, Brown was quoted by The Southern Illinoisan as saying he wished that the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. holiday was celebrated on the anniversary of his assassination, instead of on his birthday.

This got me thinking. I have to say I agree with him.

Forty years ago tonight, Dr. King was felled by an assassin's bullet at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn. Ever since then, revisionist historians have sought to sanitize his story in an effort to make the post-mortem King much less revolutionary than the Dr. King who was killed in Memphis. The chattering class on cable news programs make Dr. King out to be some type of idle dreamer as they wonder aloud, "Have we achieved Dr. King's dream?"

I swear, when I hear this claptrap I can almost envision a bucolic Dr. King, sitting on a porch, smoking a corncob pipe, and waiting for the bluebirds of justice to descend and land gently on his shoulder.

Dr. King was in Memphis to support an illegal strike by 1,200 City of Memphis sanitation workers who were members of AFSCME Local 1733. The City of Memphis had refused to recognize their union, stating (correctly) that there was no law in Tennessee that required public employers to recognize public employee unions. (Forty years later, there is still no such law.)

The final straw that forced the workers to strike was health and safety. They had been complaining to city officials that certain garbage trucks were unsafe, and that one in particular had very dangerous wiring. Public Works management told them that it was cheaper to replace the workers than to repair the vehicle in the racial vernacular of the day that I will refrain from quoting directly in this column.


FULL story at link.

[NCDem60]

1. King Day Date

If I recall correctly I believe the final deciding factor on the date of the King holiday was the Easter holiday period. They wanted to avoid having both holiday's falling on the same day and to avoid offending Christian groups.