Martin Luther King's Voice Carries 40 Years Later (2 pages of stories and links)

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.courant.com/news/nationworld/hc-mlk0404.artapr04,0,3351727.story

By JESSE A. HAMILTON | Washington Bureau Chief
April 4, 2008

MEMPHIS — - Leslie Moore is flashing his remaining teeth in a smile. It's really some kind of day, with him sitting here on a bench in city hall, wearing a sharp suit.

"We decided we was going to stand up," he says, talking about himself and the other older men in suits crowded onto the bench next to him. "We weren't going to take no more."

It was 40 years ago that they — the Memphis sanitation workers of 1968 — were all outside this same city hall, risking their safety, their livelihood and maybe their lives, making demands that had never been made before in Memphis, but standing up for nothing more than the right to be treated the same as their white counterparts. Their city fought them then. Now it was about to honor them.

They'll take it, this fresh honor. They'll smile and shake hands. But there's nothing anybody can give them these four decades later that will match what one man already did.

It was 40 years ago today that a rifle bullet sealed Martin Luther King Jr.'s message. He was here for the strike of the black sanitation workers. He was standing on the second-floor walkway outside his door at the Lorraine Motel. He was trying to do something for these ordinary men who were risking so much.

Since the moment the assassin's bullet silenced him, King's voice has carried longer than the 39-year-old man had lived and farther than he ever reached. As King's former colleague the Rev. Jesse Jackson put it at the Thursday ceremony for the sanitation workers: "What was a crucifixion in '68 is a resurrection in '08."

FULL story, videos, and more at link.