Though we honor Martin Luther King, Jr. via a national holiday on January 21 his actual birth date is January 15. With all the caucuses and political debates and news coverage going on right now, I’ve been remembering how much has changed since the early 1960s yet, sadly, how much is still the same. With Matt attending a southern university he has seen some things that this Los Angeles bred young man has never witnessed firsthand. Nothing bad but just different. It inspires our family to talk about where we’ve been historically and where we hope to go. As a history major, Matt is always great to talk to and to listen to on all topics historical. I just had a hankering to blog today in support of all the great things that Dr. King did. Here are a very few of some of the amazing things he said:
I
have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where
they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their
character.
Injustice
anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
Our
nettlesome task is to discover how to organize our strength into compelling power.
A
man who won’t die for something is not fit to live.
There
is nothing more dangerous than to build a society, with a large segment of
people in that society, who feel that they have no stake in it; who feel that
they have nothing to lose. People who have a stake in their society, protect
that society, but when they don’t have it, they unconsciously want to destroy
it.
If
a man is called to be a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as
Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry.
He should sweep streets so well that all the host of heaven and earth will
pause to say, here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well.
I
refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless
midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood
can never become reality. I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love
will have the final word.
Violence
as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. It is
impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. It
is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his
understanding; it seeks to annihilate rather than to convert. Violence is
immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love.
