Forty years

The video is via Dday at Hullabaloo.

Even at this distance, even at 40 years, I can't watch this without choking up at the fact that this was the last speech he ever gave, coming less than 24 hours before his murder. That the very last, the very last, public words he spoke were:

And so I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man! Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!

I remember hearing - I don't know how true this is, but I did hear it - that at that particular time he was physically exhausted and emotionally spent and so either he wasn't supposed to speak that night or that he hadn't prepared a speech. Either way, if so it means the whole speech was extemporaneous, making it all the more remarkable.

Watching the video - and I believe this is without the benefit of hindsight, but of course I can't prove that - you can see the weariness in his face. This is a tired man, a man who needs some time away from the arena but who knows he is unlikely to allowed it. And you can hear the resignation in his tone and in his words, the magnificent resignation of his namesake, who, not knowing what the future would hold and even possibly doubting he would have one, still stood before the assembled power of the Catholic Church at the Diet of Worms and said "it is neither safe nor honorable to act against conscience" and added, at least according to tradition, "Here I stand. I can do no other."

Martin Luther King, Jr. stood in the halls of conscience and could do no other. Unlike his namesake, his resignation, sadly, proved well-founded and we are the lesser for it. But what we are called on to do, still called on to do these decades later, is in the words of a different sort of martyr, "Don't mourn. Organize." To uphold the message, respect the messenger, and deny both to the bigots, buffoons, bozos, and bastards of the rabid right who are trying to reinvent Martin Luther King as Alan Keyes.

Footnote: August J. Pollak of Some Guy With a Website has the text of the speech Robert F. Kennedy gave that night in response to the news. He also provided this link to where you can hear the speech. Knowing as we do what happened just two months later, June 5, 1968, it has its own special poignancy.

Footnote to the Footnote: Listening to the speech, hearing RFK's soft Hyannis accent, noting that he quoted Aeschylus and referred to the ancient Greeks, I found myself wondering what the present-day right-wing smear merchants would have done to this "effeminate, poetry-quoting, elitist New England liberal." How far we have fallen.