On April 4th, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot and killed in Memphis, Tennessee, most likely with the complicity of the Memphis Police Department. So, it’s nice that the city council finally got around to renaming the three city parks named in honor of the Confederacy.
The old names were Confederate Park; Jefferson Davis Park, named for the Confederacy’s president; and Nathan Bedford Forrest Park, named for a Confederate lieutenant general and the Klan’s first grand wizard. The new names are Memphis Park, Mississippi River Park and Health Sciences Park, but the council may change those, too.
Of course, the Ku Klux Klan is upset about this and they decided to have an Easter-weekend rally protesting the name changes. Apparently, they managed to muster about 60 shitheads and were outnumbered by the police.
The night before Dr. King died, he gave one of his greatest speeches at the Mason Temple in Memphis. And it almost didn’t happen. It was pouring rain so badly that people had to pull their cars over to the side of the road. Dr. King didn’t think anyone would show up at the church in that kind of weather and he was feeling ill, so he sent Andrew Young and Ralph Abernathy ahead and told them if there was anyone at the church to call him and he’d come down there.
You can read the transcript of the civil trial that found the Memphis police responsible for MLK Jr’s death here. It’s sad that it’s been 45 years since Dr. King died and the Memphis city council is only now formally recognizing that honoring the Confederacy is insulting and stupid. But at least they’re doing it. And it’s pretty encouraging that the Klan can’t do better than 60 morons and a broken megaphone.
