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As keynote speaker at the National Conference for New Politics (held at Palmer House in Chicago over the Labor Day weekend in 1967), Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. minced no words as he laid bare multipronged systems of oppression that activists in the  United  States  and  all over the world confront in the course of their advocacy work.

Less than a year later, on April 4, 1968, King was assassinated as he stood on the balcony of a black-owned Memphis motel that served as the local headquarters for planning and coordinating support for hundreds of black sanitation workers who went on strike over inequitable pay and dangerous working conditions.

On April 8, a silent march by King's widow, Coretta Scott King, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and more than 40,000 people forced the city to concede to the sanitation  workers' demands.

Leid Stories asks: Why the refusal, even by people of color, to acknowledge that King's life's work went beyond "civil rights?"

Like the cartoon character Mr. Magoo, President Donald Trump's extreme nearsightedness predictably causes  chaos, mayhem and catastrophe--for unsuspecting and innocent people--in almost everything he does. 

Leid Stories looks at the Magoo effect in news stories and issues that now dominate the headlines.

Immigration. It's the hot-button issue that riles many countries, big and small, and in most cases there without satisfactory resolution.

But what is its purpose? And  why is it causing so much trouble?

Perhaps Leid Stories listeners can answer these and related questions.

Historian and prolific author Dr. Gerald Horne conducts a people's tour of significant issues and developments for 2018.

Horne holds the John J and Rebecca Moores chair of history and African American studies at the University of Houston. He has written dozens of books and hundreds of articles,  commentaries and s scholarly papers on struggles against imperialism, colonialism, fascism and racism.