By Abdon M. Pallasch, Political Reporter
Chicago Sun Times, January 19, 2010
At churches and schools, living rooms and nursing home parlors across the land Monday, people gathered to remember the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and to give their own takes on what his legacy means.
Is it racial harmony, African-American empowerment or about fighting for access to medical care?
Dr. Quentin Young, who dressed the head wound King received from a rock to the head in Marquette Park in 1966, told an audience of King’s contemporaries and fellow marchers — King would be 81 had he lived — at an Oak Park nursing home that King would want people to fight for health-care justice — and that means a single-payer system, Young said.
Earlier Monday at Northwestern University’s Law School, Sen. Dick Durbin invoked King’s memory to urge passage of the health-care plan as senators and congressmen try to iron out their differences over it.
Forty-four years ago, King told a Chicago audience, “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and most inhuman,” Durbin said.
Durbin pointed to a man in the audience who owes $100,000 in medical bills for treatment of his T-cell lymphoma and said, “Repeat that story 47 million times and tell me that it isn’t time for health-care reform in America. The critics of health-care reform tell us it’s too much government. . . . This bill we’re working on would increase the number of insured by 30 million. We would start to end the injustice … to make sure that the work of Martin Luther King is finally done.”
But the plan only orders everyone to buy insurance, profiting the drug companies, Young argued. Invoking the same quote Durbin used from King — Young was actually at the meeting where King said it –Young argued the current bill would not satisfy King’s dream.
“What’s coming out of the Congress is really bad. It’s rotten,” Young said. “It keeps the power in the insurance companies.”
Retired pediatrician Dr. Herbert Lerner gave Young a big hug when his fellow octogenarian entered Belmont Village of Oak Park. Lerner pointed to his wife, Ruth, and said when she marched with King through Marquette Park, “She was never so frightened in her life — and she was a Holocaust survivor.”
Lerner, Young and attorney Larry Hagen said the “tea party” protesters of today can’t match the “meanness” exhibited by the protesters who greeted King when he marched through Marquette Park.
Hagen said that as he marched with King through crowds of angry Southwest Side residents, “I passed by someone I work with every day. Neither of us ever spoke about that incident with each other.”
Durbin, Gov. Quinn, Mayor Daley and many other elected officials started the day with the Rev. Jesse Jackson at a Rainbow/PUSH Coalition breakfast downtown, then moved off to speak at events around the Chicago area throughout the day.
