With about a half-hour left for this year's Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I thought I would enter a brief entry about the man who changed an entire nation in a monumental way.
I can't say enough about what King achieved.
When I wrote a story about the George Washington Carver School in Salem, Va., a segregated institution which is now an open elementary school for "The Salem Times-Register" ten years ago, I was deeply moved by the needless struggles that African Americans of the segregation era lived through.
I was struck by this when I saw an African American boy swimming in the same swimming pool as white children at the local YMCA here in North Carolina. Upon until King and his leadership, such things were not allowed to happen in this region of the country. We are clearly a better nation for his sacrifice.
This leads me to mention King's lone cinematic appearance. It is strangely enough in the highly controversial 1967 Swedish film "I am Curious Yellow," which has many frank sex scenes for its time (I have yet to see the film myself, though I know there is a Criterion Edition of it).
According to the Internet Movie Database (imdb.com), King's appearance in the film was actually from an interview he gave in 1966 while visiting Stockholm to get Swedish support for America's Civil Rights Movement.
There were King events across the nation today, but one of them in Greensboro was supposed to feature an "American Idol" winner of African American heritage (I don't watch the show, and hence I can't remember her name). She was alas a no show, and no one as of yet knows exactly why.
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