The [MLKJR] family can prevent unauthorized shirts bearing his face...But they can't litigate how people choose to be inspired by him. We, though, can be intellectually honest about the ways we choose to appropriate his legacy.

Lincoln won a war. Dr. King led a revolution. They both fought the same enemy, a stubborn, clever enemy that is not yet vanquished.

[Watts August 11 1965] Rena Price rushed from her home in South Los Angeles to a nearby traffic stop where a white California Highway Patrol officer had pulled over her son Marquette Frye. Accounts vary on what set off the scuffle, but a patrolman hit Frye on the head with a baton and his mother jumped on another officer. A crowd witnessed their arrests. After rumors spread that police had roughed up a black woman, angry mobs formed and six days of deadly rioting ensued.

resulted in more than forty million dollars worth of property damage, [and] was both the largest and costliest urban rebellion of the Civil Rights era...

MLKJR  wrote an article for the Saturday Review in which he argued that Los Angeles could have anticipated rioting ‘‘when its officials tied up federal aid in political manipulation; when the rate of Negro unemployment soared above the depression levels of the 1930s; when the population density of Watts became the worst in the nation,’’ and when the state of California repealed a law that prevented discrimination in housing...

...arrived in Watts at the head of a ten car motorcade.

‘‘What did Watts accomplish but the death of thirty-four Negroes and injury to thousands more? What did it profit the Negro to burn down the stores and factories in which he sought employment? The way of riots is not a way of progress, but a blind ally of death and destruction which wrecks its havoc hardest against the rioters themselves’’

Pres. Obama will speak on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to observe the anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on Aug. 28 — 50 years to the day after one of the march’s organizers, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., delivered his “I Have a Dream’’ speech.