Today's front-page story in the Erie Times-News about the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., 40 years after his death by an assassin's bullet, resonates with young people who have come to know the great civil rights leader primarily through their history books.

Today's young people are fortunate in one sense, because they can do more than read the powerful words of King's most famous speeches. They can go to YouTube and watch King's "I Have a Dream" speech, which he delivered to a crowd of more than 200,000 people in August 1963 from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

King's last speech, delivered only hours before he was struck down in Memphis, is one of his most poignant, as he told the audience, "I may not get to the Promised Land."

That's the thrust of today's article by Times-News reporter Sarah Weber, who talked to people of all ages, asking them if blacks in America have made it to the Promised Land. The response was mixed. Denise Horton, who said she remembers neighbors leaving notes in her mother's mailbox that said, "Go back to Africa," said change has come -- some in ways for the better and some in ways for the worse.

"Now I see African-American young people and white young people together, wearing the same clothes, listening to the same music," Horton said. "I go to restaurants and see biracial children with their white grandparents. You would never have seen that 40 years ago. It would have been hidden."

Gannon University president Antoine Garibaldi, a Louisiana native, told Weber he remembers a time when universities in that state would pay tuition for black students to attend college elsewhere, instead of letting them through their own gates.

"Dr. King's death was a blow to what was going on in social justice," Garibaldi told Weber. "But at the same time it galvanized the cause."

-- Kevin Cuneo