Dr. Martin Luther King - A Remembrance Poem by James B. Earley

Having clocked out at the end of that Thursday's work, I entered the Company office along with a co-worker. We were informed that 'Martin Luther King had just been reportedly shot and killed.' My co-worker remarked, 'Good, he was a troublemaker.' I said to him, 'What you've just uttered is among the most insensitive statements I've ever heard spoken.' He immediately apologized, but what had been a budding friendship two or three years in the making, dissipated in a single pained moment of personal affront.

The events of that day have crossed my mind countless times since, and in its wake the co-worker's resonating words. Within ensuing decades, cumulative circumstance has proven my former co-worker's assessment irrefutably correct. As I've come to realize that Dr. King was indeed a 'troublemaker' of the most provocative fashion. The admirable view I held of him, as a 'troublemaker' promoting my idea of justice, was adversarial in fact to others who saw his associated efforts as 'troublemaking' against their own notion of justice; perceptively an immediate threat to Society's established way of life.

Conflicting somewhere within the arrogance of racial superiority, is the spiritual conundrum of social equality. A meeting of the proverbial minds is as distant now, as in Dr. King's lifetime. Years later, acknowledging the incredulous - lingering questions remain. Despite the Preacher's vaunted legacy; were his signature accomplishments, ultimately his death - simply, all perhaps waged.....for the God-awful sake of naught?