January 07, 2005
Seriously, though...
Part of me has come to dread these days leading up to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr's birthday and the King national holiday. Partly it's being reminded of the huge job in civil rights that remains undone. Partly it's a sense of guilt at my own personal lack of progress in putting that work into action.
But mostly, it's all the hate, racism, and just plain ignorance that the mere mention of Martin Luther King seems to generate in too many people. Once I would have been largely insulated from most of this. But with the double-edged tool of the Internet, the simmering anti-Kingism manages to boil over into my awareness. You yourself may have already received a viral email by someone "shocked" and "saddened" to hear of the "real truth" behind the "so-called reverend doctor" Martin Luther King Jr. I can't help what people are willing to believe. I will provide a link to this excellent Snopes dot com urban legend reference about King: http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/outrage/mlking.asp
The most interesting aspect of all the negative King rhetoric from the standpoint of those of us who are grad students involves the issue of his Boston University dissertation and plagarism. Read this Black Issues Book Review article, http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0HST/is_5_5/ai_108312743, and make up your own mind.
You can actually buy a copy of King's entire dissertation at the excellent site at the MLK Papers Project: http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/ 
Not to be missed is the"popular requests" link that provides several audio files of some of his speeches. (The '67 "Beyond Vietnam" speech particularly sent chills down my spine.)
Finally, I encourage everyone to explore the King Center's site as well as help support its efforts.
There is a lot of hate out there on the web in general and, unfortunately, increasingly in the blogosphere. But hopefully we can counter some of this hate and misinformation by linking to sites like these.
"Everybody can be great, because everybody can serve."
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