Obama Marks King Anniversary

NYT: April 4, 2008, 1:34 pm
Obama Marks King Anniversary
By Larry Rohter


Barack Obama in Fort Wayne. (Alex Brandon/AP)

FORT WAYNE, Ind. — On the 40th anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Senator Barack Obama chose to spend the day not in Memphis with the other two candidates but hopscotching around Indiana, North Dakota and Montana. Nevertheless, Dr. King’s life and legacy were the subject of an emotional speech he delivered to a racially mixed crowd during a town meeting at a high school in Fort Wayne.

Talking to reporters just after landing in Fort Wayne, Mr. Obama said he felt no worries that his absence from Memphis could be misinterpreted. He referred to his speech on race in Philadelphia two weeks ago, and mentioned that he not only had spoken at Dr. King’s home church in January on his birthday but had also talked with Coretta Scott King on Friday morning.

In his remarks at the high school, Mr. Obama sought to link Dr. King’s efforts in the 1960s to issues that are still unresolved and plague American society today. The reason Dr. King was in Memphis the day he was shot, he reminded the crowd of about 2,000 people, had to do as much with economics, in the form of wages and income, as with race. “It was a struggle for economic justice, for the opportunity that should be available to people of all races and all walks of life,” he said. “Because Dr. King understood that the struggle for economic justice and the struggle for racial justice were really one, that each was part of a larger struggle for freedom, for dignity, and for humanity.”

Mr. Obama also linked Dr. King’s drive for racial equality and social justice to his own campaign’s emphasis on bringing Americans together in pursuit of a similar common cause. The night before his assassination, Mr. Obama noted, Dr. King had argued “that Americans have the capacity, as he said that night, to project ‘the I into the thou’” a statement he linked to his own campaign’s oft-sounded argument that “we all have a stake in one another, we are our brother’s keeper, we are our sister’s keeper.”...

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/04/obama-marks-king-anniversary/

Presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and John McCain were scheduled to take part in the anniversary day events that were to include a "recommitment march" through Memphis and the laying of wreaths at the site of King's assassination. Sen. Barack Obama will be campaigning in Indiana.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080404/ap_on_re_us/king_anniversary;_ylt=AlkSy9.c1pLHlAgwGZmEv2ys0NUE

Like Obama can't be bothered with MLK...