Martin Luther King’s legacy gains candidates’ attention

Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and John McCain went to Memphis, Tenn., today 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 African American to win the White House, invoked King’s legacy while campaigning in Indiana for the Democratic presidential nomination. He and Clinton will go later to the Democratic state convention in Grand Forks, N.D., though it is unknown if they will meet.

Today’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 in the Senate.

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

“Better late than never,” the Rev. Jesse Jackson said in a television interview from the ceremony at the museum. Jackson was an aide to King when the assassin’s bullet found the civil rights leader four decades ago.

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

“I believe that we should appoint a Cabinet-level position that should be solely and fully devoted to ending poverty as were know it in America,” Clinton said at the Mason Temple in Memphis.

It would be “a position that will focus the attention of our nation on this issue and never let it go,” she said. The post would be filled by “a person whom I would see being asked by the president every single day, ‘What have you done to end poverty in America?’ No more excuses, no more whining – instead, a concerted effort.”

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 have caused throughout U.S. history.

Speaking today in Fort Wayne, Ind., Obama reminded people that King, associated with rights for African Americans, was in Memphis that fateful today also fighting for economic gains for striking sanitation workers, and said it was time to finish King’s agenda.

“That is why the great need of this hour is much the same as it was when Dr. King delivered his sermon in Memphis,” Obama said in televised remarks.

“We have to recognize that while we each have a different past, we all share the same hopes for the future - that we’ll be able to find a job that pays a decent wage, that there will be affordable health care when we get sick, that we’ll be able to send our kids to college, and that after a lifetime of hard work, we’ll be able to retire with security. They’re common hopes, modest dreams. And they’re at the heart of the struggle for freedom, dignity, and humanity that Dr. King began, and that it is our task to complete,” he said.

michael.muskal@latimes.com