And if he had chosen the occasion of a funeral to do the berating, he would deserve the scorn that is currently being heaped on Jimmy Carter and Joseph Lowrey.
The politicization of a memorial service is viewed, by most, as unseemly, rude, and ill-mannered. MLK never struck me as any of those, and I doubt he would have sunk into the mire that we all witnessed yesterday.
"This afternoon we gather in the quiet of this sanctuary to pay our last tribute of respect to these beautiful children of God. They entered the stage of history just a few years ago, and in the brief years that they were privileged to act on this mortal stage, they played their parts exceedingly well. Now the curtain falls; they move through the exit; the drama of their earthly life comes to a close. They are now committed back to that eternity from which they came.
These children-unoffending, innocent, and beautiful-were the victims of one of the most vicious and tragic crimes ever perpetrated against humanity.
And yet they died nobly. They are the martyred heroines of a holy crusade for freedom and human dignity. And so this afternoon in a real sense they have something to say to each of us in their death. They have something to say to every minister of the gospel who has remained silent behind the safe security of stained-glass windows. They have something to say to every politician [Audience:] (Yeah) who has fed his constituents with the stale bread of hatred and the spoiled meat of racism. They have something to say to a federal government that has compromised with the undemocratic practices of southern Dixiecrats (Yeah) and the blatant hypocrisy of right-wing northern Republicans. (Speak) They have something to say to every Negro (Yeah) who has passively accepted the evil system of segregation and who has stood on the sidelines in a mighty struggle for justice. They say to each of us, black and white alike, that we must substitute courage for caution. They say to us that we must be concerned not merely about who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderers. Their death says to us that we must work passionately and unrelentingly for the realization of the American dream..."
Martin Luther King, Jr.- Eulogy for the Young Victims of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church Bombing, September 18, 1963
There are many similar examples of political speech at such eulogies - it's traditional in many African-American churches. What President Bush sat through was tame by comparison to the address M L King would quite likely have made if he had lived to deliver Coretta Scot King’s eulogy to a captive audience including the President.