…[E]ven if it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, go on out and sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures; sweep streets like Handel and Beethoven composed music; sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry…

This sentiment is reminiscent of the anonymously-penned poems, “Be the Best of Whatever You Are,” (often attributed to Douglas Malloch) which Dr. King cites in the sermon. In my searches tonight reflecting on Dr. King, I really appreciated how he introduced the street sweeper at the 50th anniversary of Alpha Phi Alpha in Buffalo, 1957 – “The Birth of a New Age.” A great blueprint for any commencement speech.

“We need more people who are competent in all areas and always remember that the important thing is to do a good job. No matter what it is. Whatever you are doing consider it as something having cosmic significance, as it is a part of the uplifting of humanity. No matter what it is, no matter how small you think it is, do it right. As someone said, do it so well that the living, dead, or the unborn could do it no better.

More and more multimedia from Dr. King’s sermons and speeches in the ’50s and 60s continues to crop up and it’s sometimes stunning how much more impact the words have when spoken by the reverend himself as opposed to reads on the written page or website.
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I could not find the Buffalo ’57 audio, however I came across audio of a King speech that includes the street sweeper riff in the King Institute archives at Stanford. This 3.5-minute clip was taken from the full “The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life” sermon delivered at New Covenant Baptist Church, Chicago, Illinois, on 9 April 1967. Another recently web-published sermon of note is this one from Temple Israel, a Jewish synagogue in Hollywood from 1965 which popped up a few years ago.

In addition to the King Institute archives, find more audio of Dr. King’s speeches here, here, and here.

I love when he encourages the staff — which he acknowledges may not all be of drinking age — to take the weekend to “Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out, cause we’re gonna come back on Monday and work twice as hard.

Cue Mick & Keith.

via Politico

Over the long-run of Gallup’s tracking of Obama vs. Clinton, with daily surveys, Obama ramped up dramatically over the last 3 months of the campaign. How dramatically will the Obama vs. McCain tracking poll change in the coming months?

According to The AP delegate count, the race is already over. Victory Obama. A sweeping wave of superdelegate endorsements have finally tipped the scales and even more will announce tonight. In essence, the number 32 at right is all but irrelevant. Eleven state governors initially supported Clinton and now, as the good ol AP writes, will they flip the switch just like that?

What exactly is the Clinton campaign thinking? She’s not really still thinking about an RFK-like June surprise, one must hope.

Audio of Clinton and Obama speeches thanks to Dave Winer.