This is Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the United States, a national holiday established during the Reagan administration, although it took some time for all 50 states to implement it. Today I'm thinking about an event in Washington in August of 1963 where King, the Baptist minister and Civil Rights leader offered the keynote speech. It was carefully scripted and rather subdued until near the end when famous singer and friend Mahalia Jackson shouted from nearby on the podium "tell 'em about the dream, Martin!"While this is known as the "I Have a Dream" speech King had used this imagery in other rallies. Perhaps Jackson, who was involved in many of these gatherings, sensed that he needed to depart from the carefully prepared address to stir the crowd of hundreds of thousands.
MLK then found the cadence of his best oratory in the tradition of Black preaching and in his speech he used the oft-quoted: “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.”
While King was not a person of perfect character (who is?) he did exemplify devotion to a cause upholding the highest principles of equality and did so with tremendous courage and despite unrelenting resistance. We can't forget that not long before his murder in 1968 a Harris Poll conducted revealed that nearly 75% of Americans disapproved of King, in part because he opposed the Viet Nam War.
Today is also the inauguration of a president who is a convicted felon and sexual offender who has offered a dystopian "I Have a Nightmare" vision for the United States. Sociopaths are not people of character, yet thousands will gather in Washington to pay this one homage. He clearly views himself as an emperor, surrounded by an oligarchy of billionaires, with millions of Americans enthused about a racist agenda which will expel migrants who are, for the most part, law-abiding and hard-working and have no interest in eating pets.
As Canadians who will also be deeply affected by the isolationist plans of the emperor wannabe we need to find hope in the message and Christian witness of Martin Luther King today and consider what "character" means for us as we walk with Jesus.
Arm in arm, Martin Luther King, Jr., and his wife, Coretta Scott King, leading the voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, March 1965.
3 comments:
Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of judging people by the "content of their character"......how did America get to the point where so many millions of people could ignore the egregious content of the candidate's character? -KB
It is truly beyond my ken, Kathy. We can't talk with our conservative Christian family members about it. They are supposedly all about character as an aspect of their walk with Jesus, but Trump and his minions seem to get a great big pass.
He's a means to their ends. kb
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