While we in Naples "celebrate" Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday, let us not allow ourselves or our children to believe in the sugar-coated version of who he was and what he stood for. Our local loud-voiced anti-union people who complain about the police union, the nurses' union, the teachers' union must realize that today is devoted to someone whom they do not honor. The marchers in Memphis were striking union members, sanitation workers demanding that the city of Memphis formally recognize their union and thus grant them a voice in determining their wages, hours and working conditions. Hundreds of supporters joined their daily marches, most notably Martin Luther King Jr. He had been with the 1,300 strikers from the very beginning of their bitter struggle. He had come to Memphis to support them despite threats that he might be killed if he did. The struggles of workers for union rights often are considered to be of no great importance. Dr. King knew better. He knew that the right to unionization is one of the most important of civil rights. His last act was in support of that right, for he was killed by an assassin's bullet on April 4, 1968, as he was preparing to lead strikers in yet another demonstration. There are, of course, many reasons for honoring him on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, January 18. But we shouldn't forget that one of the most important reasons, one that's often overlooked, is Dr. King's championing of the cause of the Memphis strikers and others who sought union recognition. When I say "sugar-coated version", I'm serious about what has happened to the story of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He was kidnapped by the power elite and turned into one of the harmless props of American glory. Dr. King, after all, was an in-your-face socialist and fiercely opposed to American militarism. He talked of love but not the sappy kind. For King, love was militant. He saw direct action and civil disobedience in the face of injustice as a political expression of love because it was healing society's injuries. Love as expressed in protest exposed society's wounds and its hurt. This accent on justice for the poor is what mainstream FOXified society wants to separate from Dr. King's understanding of love. Justice! Few Florida Black persons are like the well-educated, culturally refined Dr. King or Mr. Barack Obama. The black people in our town grow up in poverty, frequently drop out of school in eighth grade, get shuttled between foster homes, abused, hustled on Collier streets and end up in prison like my friend Gregory Capehart. Dr. King, after Cicero, began telling Christians that "any religion that professes to be concerned with the souls of men and is not concerned with the slums that blasted them, the economic conditions that cripple them, is a spiritually moribund religion in need of new blood." We pretend there is equality and equal opportunity while ignoring the institutional and economic racism that infects our minds and fills our prisons, where a staggering one in nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34 are incarcerated. There are more African American men behind bars than in college. "The cell block has replaced the auction block"! In a speech titled "A Time to Break Silence" he gave at Riverside Church a year before his assassination, King called America the "greatest purveyor of violence in the world today," a quote that won't make it into many Martin Luther King Day celebrations. Dr. King's strident denunciation of War and economic injustice at the end of his life saw many white liberals, members of his own staff, as well as allies within the political power structure, turn against him. He was no sugar-coated softie, not a sleepy dreamer.