A year ago today, I posted an excerpt from the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter From a Birmingham Jail" in part because the denunciations of comprador white liberalism resonated with certain objective conditions of the NYU strike which need not be explicated further now. Today I turn instead to Dr King's speech to striking Memphis sanitation workers on April 3, 1968, the day before he was assassinated, but first I want to direct your attention to today's Democracy Now broadcast, which features conversations with one of the union members and severasl community organizers and is very interesting, particularly in relation to California Newsreel's At The River I Stand. Below is excerpted what strikes me as one of the more visionary and poetic moments of the "I've been to the mountaintop" speech mentioned above, demonstrating the forms of solidarity and connection King envisioned and was making by the late 1960s.

Strangely enough, I would turn to the Almighty and say "if you allow me to live just a few years in the second half of the twentieth century, I will be happy.

Now that's a strange statement to make, because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick, trouble is in the land. confusion all around. That's a strange statement. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars. And i see god working in this period of the twentieth century in a way that men in some strange way are responding. Something is happening in our world. The masses are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tenessee, the cry is always the same: "We want to be free."