Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was born January 15th, 1929. As many already know, he was a graduate of Morehouse College in 1948. He also graduated from Crozer Theological Seminary, now Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School (CRCDS) in 1951. I am proud to live in the legacy of King as a student at CRCDS—just as Morehouse men should also be.
King’s birthday should inspire us to go out into the world and change a society that still looks the same as the dark days of the Civil Rights movement. As we prepare for magnificent words of King’s legacy, harmonious choirs singing in response to King’s legacy, and the triumphant reliving of King’s speeches as a response to honoring his legacy let us remember this one thing—we have to continue to fight.
Let’s not damage the King legacy like Liberty University plans to do by inviting Donald Trump to speak on MLK Day.
According to Yahoo News, “Mark Hine, the senior vice president for student affairs at Liberty University, said the school always holds a convocation on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and it usually includes a video to honor his memory. I think this one was picked to afford Mr. Trump the opportunity to, among other things, honor Dr. King. It wasn’t like we said, ‘Let’s go find someone who would be anti-Martin Luther King.’ ”
Hine also told Yahoo News, “I don’t know that absolutely everything Trump would say aligns with Martin Luther King, but I don’t see him in any way as being the total opposite.”
However, Trump is the exact opposite of what King stood for. King died marching with sanitation workers who fought for fair wages and Trump wants to keep minimum wage stagnant. Trump wants to build a wall between these yet to be United States and Mexico, King would be fighting with undocumented immigrants. Trump has time and time again spewed out anti-Muslim hate rhetoric, King would have said that all people should have a chance at upward mobility despite their different faith backgrounds. Please don’t live the King legacy by supporting anti-King rhetoric.
King saw the world as a clergyman, so the question must be: how many clergy woman and men across this country are tirelessly working for social justice rather than being impediments of social justice?
I am excited to incorporate the #BlackLivesMatter movement in my Master’s thesis at CRCDS. However, how many seminaries and divinity schools are teaching social justice in the classroom?
Spend these days ahead protesting against police brutality because nearly 500 Black and Brown citizens were killed last year by the police, according to The Counted by The Guardian.
King said in his “I Have a Dream” speech, “There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, ‘When will you be satisfied?’ We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality.” We’ve got to march against police brutality with groups like Dream Defenders to defend that dream!
Poverty is still a terrible problem today because wages are stagnant and the cost of living keeps rising. Let’s defend King’s dream.
The African-American can get elected to the White House but in the same country is having a tough time being employed and can be a victim of violence from the people who are supposed to give our nation a sense of domestic tranquility. Let’s defend King’s dream.
No one understands Transgender and Queer lives and we look at their lives as if they are minimal to those who we think fit the scale of “normality”. Let’s defend King’s dream.
If we could sum up King’s magnificent life in one quote we must dwell on these words from his “I Have a Dream” speech, he said, “So, we’ve come here today to dramatize a shameful condition in a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check.”
That “check” is still bouncing and we have to defend King’s dream!
