All the way with MLK?

I’ve seen a lot of people noting that this year’s inauguration day is also Martin Luther King Day, which falls on the third Monday of each January and hasn’t coincided with the inauguration since 1997, and obviously sensible people would much rather observe that. With that in mind, I found this reminder from his daughter worth sharing:

Yeah. This old piece in The Nation marking the 50th anniversary of that speech is kind of illuminating:

Perhaps the best way to comprehend how King’s speech is understood today is to consider the radical transformation of attitudes toward the man who delivered it. Before his death, King was well on the way to being a pariah. In 1966, twice as many Americans had an unfavorable opinion of him as a favorable one. Life magazine branded his anti–Vietnam War speech at Riverside Church “demagogic slander” and “a script for Radio Hanoi.”
But in thirty years he went from ignominy to icon. By 1999, a Gallup poll revealed that King was virtually tied with John F. Kennedy and Albert Einstein as one of the most admired public figures of the twentieth century among Americans. He ranked as more popular than Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Pope John Paul II and Winston Churchill; only Mother Teresa was more cherished. In 2011, a memorial to King was unveiled on the National Mall, featuring a thirty-foot-high statue sited on four acres of prime cultural real estate. Ninety-one percent of Americans (including 89 percent of whites) approved.
This evolution was not simply a matter of ill feelings and painful memories eroding over time. It was the result of a protracted struggle that sheds light on how the speech for which he is best known is today understood.

And then it says how a wilful misunderstanding and misreading of the dream speech lets the right co-opt him, whereas I’ve no doubt they actually hated him (and still do) privately. I’ve even less doubt that Mushroom Cock does, probably not so privately, and I’m only surprised he didn’t try to have the holiday cancelled for distracting from his own big day…