Presidential candidates honor civil rights leader

McCain said he eventually realized he was wrong to oppose the MLK holiday.

Los Angeles Times

Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and John McCain went to Memphis, Tenn., on Friday to honor the memory of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., assassinated 40 years ago when the Nobel Prize-winning civil rights activist campaigned on behalf of sanitation workers.

Sen. Barack Obama, seeking to become the first black to win the White House, invoked King’s legacy while campaigning in Indiana for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Friday’s focus on King will continue the nation’s debate on race and its importance in the presidential campaign.

McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee, apologized for opposing a federal holiday for King. “We can be slow as well to give greatness its due, a mistake I made myself long ago when I voted against a federal holiday in memory of Dr. King,” McCain said in the rain at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, where King was shot. The site is now the National Civil Rights Museum.

“I was wrong and eventually realized that, in time to give full support for a state holiday in Arizona,” said McCain, who represents that state.

“We can all be a little late sometimes in doing the right thing, and Dr. King understood this about his fellow Americans,” McCain said.

The black vote has been reliably Democratic, and Obama and Clinton have been fighting for support. Exit polls have shown Obama winning as much as 90 percent of the black vote in the primaries, but Clinton has strong ties to the community and has won the support of many civil rights leaders.

“It is heartbreaking to know that Dr. King has been gone from this earth longer than he was here,” Clinton said at the Mason Temple in Memphis.

She then called for the creation of a Cabinet-level position devoted to ending poverty, a move that would continue King’s legacy.

Obama, an Illinois senator, has been dealing in recent days with the comments by his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., whose inflammatory anti-American remarks have become a staple of cable television and the Web.

Obama has condemned the comments, while continuing to speak well of Wright. In a widely praised speech on race, Obama called for understanding on all peoples’ parts of the difficulties that race has caused throughout U.S. history.

Speaking Friday while campaigning in Fort Wayne, Ind., Obama reminded people that King, associated with rights for blacks, was in Memphis that fateful day also fighting for economic gains.