03 May 2008

We're lucky that YouTube and the Internet were not around in 1968 ...

The following quote is from a Newsweek special feature on Martin Luther King's legacy.

It mentions the title of his final (and undelivered) sermon:
On Thursday, April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. had retreated to room 306 of the Lorraine Motel, worrying about a sanitation strike in Memphis and working on his sermon for Sunday. Its title: "Why America May Go to Hell."
This sermon title was for the sermon he would have preached if he had not been assassinated.

In case anyone is curious, the first ARPAnet network (the grandparent of the modern internet) didn't come online until November 1969.

1 comment:

Cindy said...

Soledad O'Brien of CNN did an excellent documentary in the Black in America series. Eyewitness to Murder:the King Assassination.

Articles and video clips and more are here at CNN's website (made tiny) http://tinyurl.com/3e2wgc

The documentary itself is available On Demand on Cable right now (at least it is on Charter).

What absolutely fascinates me is that the CNN pages at the site and the documentary itself leave one with a very different sense of the unlikelihood of the lone gunman vs. conspiracy idea.

That is to say, when I watched the documentary, I absolutely understood (for the first time) just how many pieces there are that don't add up. But when I read the website, the conspiracy page sets up a conspiracy theory in one paragraph and knocks it down in the next.

What brought this to mind due to your post, Steve, was the clips of surveillance sex tapes (that may or may not have been of King) that the FBI (theoretically anonymously) mailed to him after he won the Nobel Peace Prize, with a note saying "You are a colossal fraud and an evil vicious one at that. The American public will know you for what you are, an evil abnormal beast. King, you are done." There is a clip of regarding this at http://tinyurl.com/33ngc6

Check the documentary out, it's well worth the time and one of the best I've seen all year.