Martin Luther King Jr., Hero

I had the privilege of being part of this man's magic when I heard him speak in 1962, while I was in college in North Carolina. There -- in a segregated city where whites used one toilet and "coloreds" another, where the largest hospital admitted blacks only to windowless basement rooms -- the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., in a single afternoon, welded into one thousands of people, black and white.

Martin Luther King Jr.

I looked at the sea of faces around me, eyes shining and voices lifted. I saw whites who were thinking about civil rights for the first time in their lives and I saw blacks on the brink of discovering how much they could accomplish for the future, together.

I realized at that moment that the world I had been born into was about to change forever.

In 1968 when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, a part of me died, too.

In my whole life I have never seen another human being inspire so much good in so many people.

You had only to see him and hear him. He was not Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal -- those were labels for others, not him.

Now, on what would have been his 82nd birthday, we need him more than ever. His magic, after all, was his ability to heal open wounds, to turn hatred to hope. It is not possible to know how much better the world might have been had he lived.

And it saddens me that a whole generation of blacks don't really know who he is, that the doors didn't swing open for them by accident.

President John F. Kennedy once said, "The most important thing we do in life, the only one that really lives after us, is not our victories or defeats in battle or in politics, but our contributions to the human spirit."

Martin Luther King Jr.'s contribution to the human spirit -- beyond immense. It is simply immeasurable.


Speaker of the House John Boehner, Zero

Speaker of the House John Boehner

All eyes are on Speaker of the House John Boehner, and have been since the day the Democrats lost the House.