MLK Day and we’re trolling the web looking for inspirational nuggets from the great man and they abound and so we can’t help but laugh at the whole flap over MLK’s role in getting civil rights legislation passed. “It took a president to get it done,” said Hillary, and yes it took a kind of political bravery we haven’t seen since then for Johnson to basically write off the support of the vast majority of white people in the old south and advance civil rights. To think he could have done it, though, without the decade and more of unbelievable work MLK put in leading up to that legislation, building consensus by writing and delivering some of the most beautiful speeches of the twentieth century, marching against hate-filled cops and their hate-filled dogs, gathering people where they weren’t allowed to gather, watching friends be killed and beat and jailed the whole time for supporting the cause he was advocating, the cause he in fact came to represent in his own person…

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