King's Legacy Honored; Work Remains

ATLANTA -- As a parade of dignitaries praised Martin Luther King Jr. from the pulpit of the church he once pastored, Atlanta's mayor reminded them that his work for peace and justice remains unfinished.

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Mayor Shirley Franklin admonished the congregation at historic Ebenezer Baptist Church not to pay tribute to King's dream on his birthday and contradict it the next.

She said that millions cannot find jobs, have no health insurance and struggle to make ends meet working minimum-wage jobs.

Like King, they are called upon to follow their conscience, she said.

"What's going on Atlanta? What's going on America? What are you doing to live the dream?" Franklin said.

This year's holiday comes on the day King would have turned 78. He was assassinated while standing on the balcony of a hotel in Memphis, Tenn., on April 4, 1968. His confessed killer, James Earl Ray, was arrested two months later in London.

Coretta Scott King, his widow, died last year on Jan. 31 at age 78.

An activist in her own right, she also fought to shape and preserve her husband's legacy after his death.

Shortly after his death, she founded what would become the Martin Luther King Junior Center for Nonviolent Social Change. For years, she worked to establish Jan. 15 as a federal holiday, which became a reality in 1986.

King's Papers Now On View

The Atlanta History Center opened Monday for the first public exhibition of King's papers since they were returned to his hometown.

The exhibit, which includes King's letter from Birmingham jail, an early draft of King's famous speech "I Have A Dream," his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize, and more than 600 of his other personal documents.

It is a glimpse at a portion of the collection of more than 10,000 King papers and books that Mayor Shirley Franklin helped acquire for the city for $32 million from Sotheby's auction house last summer. More than 50 corporate, government and private donors pitched in to give the papers to Atlanta's Morehouse College, where King graduated in 1948 with a bachelor's degree in sociology.

The exhibit will remain at the history center through May 13. The papers will then be housed at the Robert W. Woodruff Library on the campus of the Atlanta University Center, which includes Morehouse College.

Also Monday, Stanford University's Martin Luther King Research and Education Institute released the sixth volume in its series on King's papers. The volume contains some of King's earliest sermons and other writings, shedding light on the theological roots of his activism.

Coretta Scott King asked Stanford professor Clayborne Carson to examine the papers in 1997.

President Urges Participation

President George W. Bush made an unannounced stop at a high school near the White House on Monday to encourage people to give back to their communities to honor the slain civil rights leader.

The president helped paint a mural at the school for a few moments as students and volunteers helped spruce up the school. Classes were not in session.

Bush called on Americans to "take the opportunity to help somebody in need," saying that by doing so, they are honoring King's legacy.

At Michigan State University, officials presented a one-day civil rights exhibit that displayed slave shackles, a document from King's voting rights march in Alabama and a fingerprint card for Rosa Parks made after her 1955 arrest for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man.

Marchers commemorating King Day in Troy, Ohio, were heckled by a group of seven neo-Nazi protesters shouting white power slogans and carrying signs, police said. There were no arrests.

Some workers at a massive Smithfield Foods plant in North Carolina missed the first shift Monday, to protest a company decision not to give them Martin Luther King Day as a paid holiday.

The United Food and Commercial Workers Union estimates that 400 people among the 2,500 who were scheduled to work either walked out or didn't come to work Monday. A company spokesman said about 100 to 150 people miss work on a typical shift.

The hog slaughtering plant, located about 80 miles south of Raleigh, employs a large number of black and Hispanic workers.

The union and the workers asked the company last week to grant the day as a paid holiday. But the company said it had already planned Monday as a work day and that the timing of the request didn't provide enough time to change plans.

Marking the day, Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., said Monday he would vote to keep the Confederate flag off South Carolina's Statehouse grounds, a location that prompted the NAACP's ongoing boycott of the state.

"If I were a state legislator, I'd vote for it to move off the grounds -- out of the state," the Delaware senator and Democratic presidential hopeful said before the civil rights group held a march and rally at the Statehouse.

Biden said he expects South Carolina legislators will eventually move the flag. Pointing to his heart, he said, "as people become more and more aware of what it means to African-Americans here, this is only a matter of time."

Jackson Describes Long March

In Chicago, Sen. Barack Obama received a standing ovation at the annual Rainbow Coalition/PUSH King scholarship breakfast when the Rev. Jesse Jackson introduced him with an approving reference to the Illinois Democrat's presidential aspirations.

Introducing Obama, Jackson told a crowd at the annual King scholarship breakfast, "it's a long, nonstop line between the march in Selma in 1965 and the inauguration in Washington in 2009."

Screaming admirers managed to get Obama's autograph after he advocated removing troops from Iraq, rebuilding struggling areas such as the suburb of Harvey where he was speaking and increasing civic activism and calling on people, especially fathers, to be better parents.

Jackson was with King the day he was gunned down.