Martin Luther King Day

Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies. This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men…. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. –MLK

A tall order. But in some ways my downfall is that I believe this with my whole heart. And I also believe that education is key to getting there. Not education as in standards and tests and rhetoric, but the kind I hope to support: communities where conversation about ideas can happen in safety, where people grow into their potential by asking daring questions and tapping into their passions to fuel discovery, and where all members of the community value one another and listen to one another. I think that is what love looks like in a classroom, and I think that is our calling as educators: to create such spaces.

It is slow work and important work, and the only way I know of to prepare people to wake up to The Dream.

A Way Out of No Way
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

When our days become dreary with low-hovering clouds of despair, and when our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, let us remember that there is a creative force in this universe, working to pull down the gigantic mountains of evil, a power that is able to make a way out of no way and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows. Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.

Let us realize that William Cullen Bryant is right: “Truth crushed to earth will rise again.” Let us go out realizing that the Bible is right: “Be not deceived, God is not mocked. Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” This is for hope for the future, and with this faith we will be able to sing in some not too distant tomorrow with a cosmic past tense, “We have overcome, we have overcome, deep in my heart, I did believe we would overcome.”

Source: Final speech to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, August 16, 1967, in I Have A Dream, edited by James Washington

(thanks to Inward/Outward for posting these quotes)