Martin Luther King Jr.

I think the Kennedys have it right. Rather than dwelling on the anniversaries of assassinations, they mark the birthdates of JFK and RFK with family rituals.

Having said that, I will share with you here some of the remarks I made at the 2004 birthdate observation of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The place was The Central Synagogue in midtown Manhattan, New York City. The hosts were Jews and blackfolks.

“When he was 18 years old, in 1947, he became his father’s assistant at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church. He was ordained Feb. 25, 1948, a few weeks after he turned 19 and a few months before he graduated from Morehouse College.

“Fifty years ago, when King was 25, the civil rights revolution began in earnest when the U.S. Supreme Court decided that separate was not equal in the nation’s public school system and declared segregation unconstitutional. We as a nation are still grappling with the import of that decision. Even when I went to the ‘white’ high school, months after King’s death, my hometown was just getting around to implementing the Supreme Court’s decision of so long before to integrate ‘with all deliberate speed.’

“1954 was not only momentous because of the Brown decision, but that is also the year when MLK became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama – 25 years old! 14 months later he was chosen to head the Montgomery Improvement Association, which was leading the bus boycott that began after Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to relinquish her seat to a white man on a city bus. For the remainder of his life he was blessed and burdened by a role that, by Aug. 28, 1963, had made him as A. Phillip Randolph said in introducing him to an audience of hundreds of thousands in Washington, ‘the moral leader of our nation'….

“I come today not to presume what a living 75-year-old MLK would be doing other than going to church and enjoying birthday cake with his family. But I come to encourage all of us – myself included – to do as King did in his short life, which saw landmark litigation, marches, sit-ins, pray-ins, wade-ins, freedom rides, anti-war demonstrations.

“To me, it’s irrelevant whether King was a saint or not. He was a doer. When called upon to work to change what was wrong with the world, beginning in Montgomery, he took on the job, despite the sacrifices that entailed….

“Around Easter we Christians often sing, ‘Were you there when they crucified my Lord?’ Of course, we were not. That was thousands of years ago. But we can update that question to ask not just where we were during various stages in the struggles for justice and peace, but where we are and where we will be.”