Honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

I was 15 years old when Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed in 1968.

I was sitting on the floor watching television in the den and my mother was in the kitchen making dinner. “Breaking News” came on to the TV, and in those days “Breaking News” actually meant something. The announcer came on to say that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had been shot and killed in Memphis.

I turned around quickly and saw that my mother had walked in from the kitchen; she stood there frozen and ashen, staring at the television. Right afterwards my father walked in the back door and I ran up to him saying “Daddy! Daddy! Martin Luther King has been shot and killed!” A very bizarre look came over my father’s face as he looked into the distance and said between his teeth, “Those bastards.”

What did he mean? Did he know who killed him? I didn’t understand. But on some level I did, and in time I would understand even more. It wasn’t all that relevant who had actually pulled the trigger. “They” had killed him: those who wanted him dead.

I remember how Coretta Scott King and Stevie Wonder and others worked so hard, year after year, to finally get MLK’s birthday turned into a national holiday. They succeeded in 1983. And it’s important that they did, because on this day we remember. King’s body was destroyed, but the ideas he lived and died for stay alive as long as they stay alive in us.

Reg Lancaster / Stringer

Some people think MLK Day should be a “day of service,” but that has never seemed enough to me. I think it should be a day of justice, of nonviolence, and of love. He was about radical change in the direction of a more just society. He was about refusing to be quiet about things that mattered most. He was about refusing to hate our enemies. He was about “injecting a new dimension of love into the veins of human civilization.”

Every day since Dr. King’s death, instead of feeling more at peace with it, I have become even sadder. Why? Because everything we were afraid might happen when he died, has happened. Dr. King kept dreams aloft that all of us could embrace, and when he died it felt like the dreams died with him.

MLK Day is a day to revive the dream. To re-embrace the principles. To recommit to justice. “The desegregation of the American South is the political externalization of the goal of the Civil Rights movement,” he said, “but the ultimate goal is the establishment of the beloved community.” He said we must have outer changes in our circumstances and internal shifts in our souls. Those ideas, and so many others he articulated, have guided my path both as a woman and as a candidate. Dr. King remains a light on the path of anyone who has ever hoped to help create a better world.

Today I gave a personal and political talk about Dr. King and his legacy. You can watch that talk above and here.

May our campaign shine even a fraction of the light into the world that Dr. King shone while he was here. What a blessing that we can continue to learn from the depth of his ideas and the courage of his life.