Don’t Sneeze

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated 50 years ago today. He had delivered his last sermon, the “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech, in Memphis the night before, remembering that he had almost died 11 years before when a black woman stabbed him at a book signing. The New York Times reported that the wound was so severe that he’d have died had he sneezed.

“In his last sermon, King reflected on that experience, recalling that a ninth-grade girl wrote him afterward to say she was glad he hadn’t sneezed. . . .

“‘I too am happy that I didn’t sneeze. Because if I had sneezed, I wouldn’t have been around here in 1960, when students all over the South started sitting-in at lunch counters.

“‘If I had sneezed I wouldn’t have been here in 1963, when the black people of Birmingham, Alabama, aroused the conscience of this nation, and brought into being the Civil Rights Bill. 

“‘If I had sneezed, I wouldn’t have had a chance later that year, in August, to try to tell America about a dream that I had had.’”

—Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968), civil rights leader, in Aaron Couch, “In last speech, Martin Luther King Jr. ‘not concerned’ about early death,” The Christian Science Monitor, 2011. Image: Joseph Louw, The Lorraine Motel, Memphis. 

 

 

• Editorial Comment: The dream is still out there. Somewhere.

peezpix by Ted Pease

RIP

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Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard