Happy MLK Day

"Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity."

Martin Luther King, Jr. was a social activist and Baptist minister who played a vital role in the American civil rights movement from the mid-1950s until his assassination in 1968. Through peaceful protest, King sought equality and human rights for African Americans, the economically disadvantaged, and all victims of injustice.

His "I Have a Dream" speech was delivered on August 28, 1963, during the March on Washington. A call for equality and freedom, it became one of the defining moments of the civil rights movement and one of the most iconic speeches in American history.

At thirty-five, Martin Luther King, Jr., was the youngest man to have received the Nobel Peace Prize.

This day is about remembering a man who used his voice to promote service and nonviolence. It's about remembering someone who lost his life to violence but whose legacy is one of nonviolence because violence never heals.

“Everybody can be great because anybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love."

I'm currently reading A Song Flung Up to Heaven by Maya Angelou. In the sixth volume of her critically acclaimed landmark autobiography, she brings to a triumphant conclusion one of the most compelling, moving, and beautiful personal testimonies of hope, faith, and courage of this or any time.

A decade before Angelou published her first and now-classic book, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, she was a civil rights activist and a friend of Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Dr. King was a human being. He had a wonderful sense of humor. It is very dangerous to make a person larger than life. Because then young men and women are tempted to believe, well, if he was that great, he's inaccessible, and I can never try to be that or emulate that, or achieve that. Martin Luther King had a brilliant mind, a powerful heart, insight, courage, and a sense of humor. So he was accessible", she said.