We Share A Dream

By Anna & Wes Hessel

Thank You, Dr. King…

We celebrate the birthday of one of the greatest and most humble human beings to ever live, Dr. Martin Luther King, a Godly man of peace and gentle warrior.  He selflessly championed for civil rights and worked to change the world into a better place.  Many hard won civil rights from that time have been attacked during the Trump administration but now with the inauguration of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, Dr. King’s legacy will continue to live on.  The Biden-Harris inaugural team has instituted a day of service to honor the remarkable Martin Luther King, Jr.

 The Son of a King

Born the son of a preacher man, Michael King, Jr., entered life in 1929 on January 15th in Atlanta.  His father, Michael, Sr., was himself the scion of a pastor.  Junior joined senior in 1934 on a sojourn through  Rome, Tunisia, Egypt, Jerusalem, and Bethlehem, commissioned by the church the elder King pastored.  The final stop was in Berlin for the Baptist World Alliance’s international conference.

The Fight for Reform

There both Kings saw firsthand the spread of Nazi influence.  The BWA issued an official policy statement, saying, “This Congress deplores and condemns as a violation of the law of God the Heavenly Father, all racial animosity, and every form of oppression or unfair discrimination toward the Jews, toward coloured people, or toward subject races in any part of the world.”  Having visited sites in the German capital which were involved with the Reformation movement started by Martin Luther, Michael Sr. began to call himself, “Martin Luther King, Sr.” and renamed his son accordingly, making it official on junior’s birth certificate in 1957.

Growing Up Black

Junior had befriended a Caucasian boy before they both entered first grade, but because of their skin color difference, they went to separate (segregated) schools.  The white child’s parents a short time later then cut off contact between the two, citing race as the deciding factor.  When the younger Martin Luther went to his parents about the break, they sat him down to detail the slavery of blacks and resultant racism.  When confronted with all that had been perpetrated against people of color, MLK said later he became, “determined to hate every white person”.  His father and mother, though, taught junior that Jesus called for the love of everyone.

Beginning to Speak Out

King Sr. was an early civil rights activist himself, standing up against the separation of races and discrimination of voting rights.  In the meantime, King Jr. had been growing in his faith, quoting the Bible by age five, as well as singing hymns.  Also, in his early years his gift for persuasive speech was growing, a number of times talking himself out of fights.  He joined his high school’s debate team, and his first public speaking engagement was in Dublin, GA, April 1944, at an Order of Elks oration contest.  His speech included the words, “Black America still wears chains. The finest negro is at the mercy of the meanest white man. Even winners of our highest honors face the class color bar.”  Martin Luther King, Jr., won the tourney, but the truth of his words were echoed in events that occurred on his way home.

Busted

During the return trip by bus, the driver demanded the teacher escorting him and King stand so white passengers could sit.  After junior’s initial refusal, his instructor told King Jr. to not acquiesce would be breaking the law.  He was called a “black son-of-a-bitch” by the driver.  The younger King went along but later characterized the issue, “That night will never leave my memory. It was the angriest I have ever been in my life.”

Seeing the Light

MLK went to Morehouse College, but during the summer before his matriculation,  King with a group from Morehouse traveled by train to Simsbury, CT, to pick tobacco for the vacation months.  This was King Jr.’s first experience with the integrated Northern living, and it made a deep impression.  He would choose to enter Christian ministry at 18, graduating from Crozer Theological Seminary in 1951, and then pursued his doctorate at Boston University.  During that time, he was introduced by a mutual friend to Coretta Scott, and they were married June 18th, 1953.

Truer Words Were Never Spoken…

In addition to his work, the greatest legacy of Dr. King in his words – here are some of his inspiring quotes…

• “The quality, not the longevity, of one’s life is what’s important…”
• “Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.”
• “There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life’s July and left standing amid the piercing chill of an alpine November.”
• “Every man lives in two realms: the internal and the external.  The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion.  The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live.”
• “Rarely do we find men who willingly engage is hard, solid thinking.  There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions.  Nothing pains some people more than having to think.”
• “All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.”
• “An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.”
• “The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically.  Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education.”
• “We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.”
• “There is nothing more tragic than to find an individual bogged down in the length of life, devoid of breath.”
• “Property is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround it with rights and respect, it has no personal being.  It is part of the earth man walks on.  It is not man.”
• “Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.”
• “Science investigates; religion interprets.  Science gives man knowledge, which is power; religion gives man wisdom, which is control.  Science deals mainly with facts; religion deals many with values.  The two are not rivals.”
• “We are not makers of history.  We are made by history.”
• “Lightning makes no sound until it strikes.”
• “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”
• “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?”
• “We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.”
• “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”
• “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
• “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.  Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
• “The time is always right to do what is right.”
• “A riot is the language of the unheard.”
• “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

                               

TEXT of  “I Have a Dream…” Speech

Dr. Martin Luther King’s greatest spoken legacy is the words of one of the most famous speeches of all time; here are those immortal words:

“I Have a Dream

I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.

But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free; one hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination; one hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity; one hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself in exile in his own land.

So we’ve come here today to dramatize a shameful condition. In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was the promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note in so far as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.”

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so we have come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.

We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now.

This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.

Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy; now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice; now is the time to lift our nation from the quick sands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood; now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.

It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment.

This sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. And those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content, will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.

But there is something that I must say to my people, who stand on the worn threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.

We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protests to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force. The marvelous new militancy, which has engulfed the Negro community, must not lead us to a distrust of all white people. For many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom.

We cannot walk alone. And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back.

There are those who are asking the devotees of Civil Rights, “When will you be satisfied?”

We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality; we can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities; we cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro’s basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one; we can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating “For Whites Only”; we cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro in Mississippi cannot vote, and the Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote.

No! no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until “justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations.  Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality.

You have been the veterans of creative suffering.

Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive.

Go back to Mississippi. Go back to Alabama. Go back to South Carolina. Go back to Georgia. Go back to Louisiana. Go back to the slums and ghettos of our Northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed.  Let us not wallow in the valley of despair.

I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream.

It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

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.

I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day down in Alabama — with its vicious racists, with its Governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification — one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low. The rough places will be plain and the crooked places will be made straight, “and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.”

This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.

With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brother-hood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

And this will be the day.

This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning, “My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my father died, land of the pilgrim’s pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.” And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true.

So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire; let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York; let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania; let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado; let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California.

But not only that.

Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia; let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee; let freedom ring from every hill and mole hill of Mississippi. “From every mountainside, let freedom ring.”

And when this happens, and when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:

“Free at last. Free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.”

The dream IS still alive….it will never die….so let freedom ring…

https://www.calamitypolitics.com/2020/09/06/womens-suffrage-100-years-in-retrospect-14906/