Martin Luther King Jr. Day

I have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness only because I take responsibility for maintaining it. Today I am reminded again that I need to share in the efforts and honor the ongoing struggle for freedom, equality, and dignity for all people.

Agenda today:
1. Journal:
What have I done lately to teach or support freedom, equality, and dignity for all people?

How can I better define myself as part of the human (rather than white) race?

2. Celebrate:
Today I attended the annual NAACP Martin Luther King Jr. celebration. I arrived just as the march was ending. 

It was good to see many people I know there, including some of my students. The speakers were especially good this year, and I enjoyed the singing also.

3. Study:
Each year I read more of the writing of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. This year I read his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail", directed to a group of eight white southern clergymen (the full text is here). Two sections that I like:

“You may well ask: "Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word "tension." I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. ...The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation."

“I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”