A friend of mine recently posted in a chat room...
"To the point at hand, Rev Dr. King, Jr. was all but ostracized from the
'mainstream' civil rights movement for speaking out against the Vietnam War
in 1967."

While I agree with much of what Jeffrey says, the above statement is misleading. The objections on King's global view were because of the movement's narrowcasted view of the achievements of civil rights. America has a bad habit of trying to solve its own problems first before asking other countries to follow its lead. In other words, others in the movement were not so much "ostracizing" King for speaking out against the war and being upset that he was not keeping focus on the problems at home. King, on the other hand, saw injustice and inequity as a global issue to be vanquished hopefully in his lifetime.
He was a visionary. He had to be because of what he knew would be a short time to do a lot of the Lord's work.
All these attempts to wrap Obama in the cloak of history as if his ascendancy is the cure rather than a benchmark can only result in a hope hangover for the country. He has the potential to take us farther than we deserve and make us all better citizens of the world. Obama has been gifted with King's global vision but our collective nearsightedness threatens to leave us all blind to the possibilities of being the world leader we used to be....and can become again.