I felt a little reproached by Dayo's lovely post, because not only do I not have an answer to the question, "Where were you ...?", but I realized I've hardly ever heard Martin Luther King, Jr. speak. Read him, yes, innumerable times. Probably seen a few short clips of him in grade school. But hardly ever heard his words, at length, in his own voice.
This is why YouTube is so great, even if most of its videos are weird distractions. It makes images that would formerly only pop up in documentaries or in the occasional educational video as available as if they were still looping on the nightly news. It links the present more intimately with the past. In the space of ten minutes I can go from Hillary to Barack to McCain to Reagan to RFK to MLK. Not all these figures do well by the comparison, but at least we can do it now.
In that spirit, here's a segment of the last speech Martin Luther King gave, the night before he died.
--Eve Fairbanks