King Would Relish Today's Challenges

40 years after civil-rights leader's death, Jesse Jackson finds message undimmed
By Nick McMaster,  Newser Staff
Posted Apr 3, 2008 5:10 PM CDT
King Would Relish Today's Challenges
The National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tenn. depicts the 1968 sanitation workers' strike with a display, Tuesday, March 25, 2008.   (AP Photo/Greg Campbell)

With tomorrow marking the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination, the Rev. Jesse Jackson pens an appreciation for the New York Daily News. Jackson worked with the civil-rights giant in 1968 on King's last, tragically unfulfilled project, the Poor People’s Campaign. "He'd keep on dreaming and organizing," Jackson writes of King, were he still alive today.

Jackson reminds us that while King's “dream” is most remembered, the Poor People’s Campaign was to have been “a journey for concrete, measurable racial and economic equality,” focusing on goals like universal health care. Jackson thinks King would continue the fight for education and health care, and would’ve push for Iraq war funds to be redirected to the war on poverty. (More Martin Luther King Jr. stories.)

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