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Heroes and King

With gentle winds from the north, the air will be cool for us today. The sky will be a rich blue, and the sun will be bright. It is a holiday as we celebrate the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I knew of him toward the end of his life and the beginning of mine, and his mode of non-violent protest which I respected then and I still do now.

I was reading this piece about heroes by Heather Cox Richardson and found this passage to share today:

"On April 3, 1968, the night before the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated by a white supremacist, he gave a speech in support of sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. Since 1966, King had tried to broaden the Civil Rights Movement for racial equality into a larger movement for economic justice. He joined the sanitation workers in Memphis, who were on strike after years of bad pay and such dangerous conditions that two men had been crushed to death in garbage compactors.

After his friend Ralph Abernathy introduced King to the crowd, King had something to say about heroes: 'As I listened to Ralph Abernathy in his eloquent and generous introduction and then thought about myself, I wondered who he was talking about.'"

An uncertain hero, maybe? Let us take a moment today to think of him and what he hoped for, for all of us.

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The author of this post is Tom Aposporos, a licensed real estate broker in both Florida and New York. In a business career of more than four decades, he also served as mayor of his home city, a commissioner in his adopted island city, and chaired a publicly-owned bank through a period of financial recovery. These experiences have enhanced his knowledge and have brought additional dimension to his real estate career.