I'll kick off this holiday weekend with a little tribute to the great American civil rights leader, from a Dec. 2002 Charles Krauthammer column...

"The civil rights movement brought about the abolition of the American racial caste system. Enfranchising a minority is, in and of itself, a singular achievement. But the civil rights movement rose above sectarianism and insisted on defining itself far more broadly as a vindication of America's very purpose.

Martin Luther King succeeded in taking a liberation movement that could easily have turned irredeemably divisive and deeply anti-American--note the bitter endemic conflicts engendered by other liberation movements around the world--and dedicated it instead to a reaffirmation of American principles. The point is not just what King and his followers did for African-Americans, but what they did--by validating America's original promise of freedom and legal equality--for the rest of America...

Perhaps even more important than the civil rights movement's ends, however, were its means. That was its other great gift to America. The civil rights movement transformed nonviolence from a notion into a norm--an act of astonishing political creativity whose legacy has been so thoroughly assimilated into contemporary American life that today we hardly appreciate it.

The fact is, however, that the civil rights movement forever set the standard for social transformation in America. We owe to King--his vision, his courage and his discipline--the fact that every subsequent social movement from environmental to gay rights to antiwar has almost automatically embraced nonviolence. Political violence has, of course, not been abolished. But the nobility and success of the civil rights movement has delegitimized the very idea of political violence--giving us a country that now routinely achieves profound social change in an atmosphere of comity and mutual respect rarely seen anywhere else in the world.

That is what King and his followers gave America."