Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments.
Al Jazeera America
The U.S. paused to remember the life of civil rights great Martin Luther King Jr. on Monday, with a series of events taking place across the nation to mark the annual celebration of his life.Hundreds of people filled Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta — where King preached — to reflect on his legacy through prayer and song. It was one of many commemorations honoring the assassinated black rights leader and peace activist. At the National Mall in Washington, D.C., a wreath laying ceremony took place at the base of the MLK statue.
In Georgia, governor Nathan Deal said there were not many states that can boast a native son that merits a national holiday, but added, "We Georgians can."
Deal said this year he would work with state legislators to find an appropriate way to honor King at the Georgia Capitol, which drew a standing ovation from the audience. He did not give any specifics.
The Guardian
Few are aware that Martin Luther King, Jr. once applied for a permit to carry a concealed handgun.In his 2011 book Gunfight, UCLA law professor Adam Winkler notes that, after King's house was bombed in 1956, the clergyman applied in Alabama for a concealed carry permit. Local police, loathe to grant such permits to African-Americans, deemed him "unsuitable" and denied his application.
The lesson from this incident is not, as some NRA members have tried to suggest in recent years, that King should be remembered as a gun-toting Republican. (Among many other problems, this portrayal neglects to acknowledge how Republicans used conservative anger about Civil Rights advances to win over the Dixiecrat South to their side of the aisle). Rather, the fact that King would request license to wear a gun in 1956, just as he was being catapulted onto the national stage, illustrates the profundity of the transformation that he underwent over the course of his public career.
While this transformation involved a conversion to moral nonviolence and personal pacifism, that is not the whole story. King's evolution also involved a hesitant but ultimately forceful embrace of direct action — broad-scale, confrontational and unarmed. That stance had lasting consequences in the struggle for freedom in America.
NPR
Last fall, curators and interns at the New York State Museum were digging through their audio archives in an effort to digitize their collection. It was tedious work; the museum houses over 15 million objects. But on this particular day in November, they unearthed a treasure.As they sifted through box after box, museum director Mark Schaming remembers: "They pull up a little reel-to-reel tape and a piece of masking tape on it is labeled 'Martin Luther King, Jr., Emancipation Proclamation Speech 1962.'"
It's audio no one knew existed.
That year — 1962 — fell in the midst of the Civil War centennial. At one commemorative event, New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller proposed a focus on the Emancipation Proclamation and invited King to speak. No one had heard his speech since. When Schaming listened to the audio, he found it still relevant. "It's 100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation is released, and this promise is still unfulfilled, very much as it is still today in many ways," the museum director says.
Reuters
Visions of what Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would do to promote civil rights in 2014, had he not been slain decades ago, marked speeches and commemorations held across the country to honor his memory on Monday.Recalling King's famous "I Have a Dream," speech, Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed said the late civil rights leader would want school children to hear it as a call to stay in school and become educated to better the world.
"We need to swap the lesson plan for a dream plan," Reed told a crowd at Ebenezer Baptist Church gathered for the Martin Luther King Jr. Day federal holiday.
He said King would want children to hear: "You are not going to school just to study math, you're going to school to be somebody."
In New York City, newly elected Mayor Bill de Blasio, who swept into office promising broader opportunities for poorer residents, said at a tribute: "Dr. King would tell us we can't wait" to bring income equality to New Yorkers.
De Blasio vowed his administration would immediately "start the work of changing this city."