if he were alive today

[no_to_war_economy]

"Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation's history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movement, and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance. For we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us." MLK-4 April 1967

speech link

[Geoff R. Casavant]

1. Unfortunately, that would have happened much earlier

Since his assassination, much has been learned and discovered to show that MLK was as tarnished as the rest of us -- the biggest things I can think of were his adulterous affairs (which, IIRC, were recorded by Hoover's FBI), and the revelation that he plagiarized significant portions of his doctoral thesis.

Had he not been killed, I expect he would have faded with these revelations because a lot of his mystique would have been lost.