On this day in 1968, Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had gone to support the city's sanitation workers in their strike for better working conditions. The night before he died, he gave a speech at the Memphis Temple Church in which he said, "I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land."
This is the man who also urged the nation to judge a man by the content of his character, not the color of his skin. The timbre of the election season demonstrates to us that we have a long way to go before we live up to this part of Dr. King's dream. We're a complicated country, and it's a delicate topic, but if we teach our children that every kind of person deserves respect, we'll move farther down the road to true equality.
