MLK Where Are You?

 

On the 2021 Holiday that is knows as MLK Day, and like recent years on MLK Day, I reflect on this great man, his leadership, and his message.  Although I was too young to understand or even know about him during years 1-5 of life when I shared the earth with this amazing man, years later I learned so much about him and the respect grew and continues today. When people ask, “if you could talk with anyone from history who would you choose?” – MLK is on my short list (ironically along with Abraham Lincoln). 

So on this day, I re-read Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have a Dream Speech” and want to share some of the lesser quoted excerpts that were relevant in 1963, and still are in 2021. 

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

Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy.

Now it the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice.

Now it the time to lift our nation from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood.

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.

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’s died, land of the Pilgrim’s pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring!”

When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every tenement 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 spiritual, “Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.”