"Be true to what you said on paper."

On the eve of what would have been his 83rd birthday, here is part of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s final speech, known as the Mountaintop, delivered in Memphis on April 3, 1968. He was thirty-nine years old. He discusses the time he was stabbed at a book signing in New York, and the report that the blade was so close to his aorta that if he had sneezed, he would have died. He mines gold out of a letter he received from a girl in White Plains who wrote, "I'm so happy that you didn't sneeze." He was in Memphis that day to help sanitation workers who were on strike, and spoke of the many threats he had received. We have come a long way in the intervening decades, and he has now been dead longer than he was alive; yet so much of his speech sounds like the day before yesterday. I am reading about the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and imagining what he would have said about that. The work of making America live up to its creed remains very far from finished, but we have his words and example to challenge and inspire us, and to remind us how high a price our forebears paid for our freedom. In light of that, the greatest sin would be to waste that freedom, to sit out the struggle. Happy birthday, Dr. King.