Fifty years ago ... Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down in Memphis. The Washington Post is running a series of commentaries. The New York Times ran an emotional editorial. Neither paper will mention that they each denounced Dr. King in his later years. Nor will any outlet today likely mention that King had fallen sharply out of favor with much of the national media ... on April 4, 1967. The offense was a speech in New York. King spoke of the "hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence" abroad, and added that a country as financially and politically committed to war as ours could never fight a "War on Poverty" in earnest. One hundred and sixty-eight newspapers denounced him in the days that followed. These editorials had a peculiarly vicious flavor. In late 1967, King pooh-poohed the "violence" and "extremism" criticisms of the civil rights movement, explicitly saying the excesses of urban rioters were "infinitely less dangerous and immoral" than the cold, corporatized murder of the "American mainstream." "If destruction of property is deplorable," he asked, "what is the use of napalm on people?" Yet the "mainstream" King is the one most Americans have been conditioned to believe in. King ... died wanting us to radically change our way of life. But history has sanitized him, turning him into a mainstream leader who accomplished what he could within an acceptable role. That sanitizing continues on each of these anniversaries, and is a sad commentary on our inability to listen to even the best of us.