Martin Luther King, Jr.
He helped us become a better people, and a more just nation. He actually changed my life, though he never knew it.
It was his “I Have A Dream” speech that did it. I was 18 years old at the time, heading off to college. I walked through the room that happened to have the television on showing the March on Washington. He was just starting.
No one else was in the room. I stood watching for a few minutes, and then realized I had sat down on the edge of the sofa. I guess I was initially interested because my hometown paper said this man I knew little about was a Communist agitator, a troublemaker out to destroy America.
But listening to his speech (it sounded like a sermon to me) I was completely captivated by his words. His language was beautiful, almost poetic, even to a young kid like me, clear, and not at all threatening.
What he was saying sounded perfectly reasonable to me. When he finished the crowd went wild, and I remember wondering why anyone would not agree with what he had said.
But they didn’t. Not one bit, in fact. My hometown paper attacked everything he said, and warned of the trouble he would continue to stir up in cities like ours and all around the South.
As a young minister only a few years later I came face to face with people who shared those views, and witnessed how mean and ugly people can be to one another, even hearing more than once someone say they wish somebody would kill that N…, and, of course, they did.
Today the nation remembers the great contributions of this man who was so very young at the time, but I think it is just as important for us to remember that there was little such sentiment across the nation among whites at the time he lived.
My racist hometown newspaper was like thousands of others all around the country, and especially in the Deep South. Dr. King was vilified far more than venerated during his life time.
It is in his death that he has come to be remembered for what he truly was in life…a man of God whom history chose to lead our nation to realize that liberty and justice for all had to mean “all” if it meant anything…
a man who was willing to give his last measure in service to a righteous cause…
a man who rose to great heights because he chose to practice the ethic of love toward all…
Today, then, is not a holiday for some of us. It is a day to remember the birthday of a special man…
a man whose life, far too short, lives on in the minds and hearts of those of us whose lives he changed by being who he was.
And that fact makes me offer this simple prayer, “Thank God Almighty for Martin Luther King, Jr.”
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