Our family typically makes it to a MLK Day celebration because we feel like it’s important not to just treat this as another day off. Usually, we go the BAM MLK Celebration, but we didn’t make it this year (sorry I missed Dr. Michael Eric Dyson). Instead–and in addition to watching the livestream of the Blackout For Human Rights #MLKNow event–we all found quotes from Dr. King that spoke to each of us, shared them and discussed why we chose it. Here are two that I found to be really inspiring.
The first is a passage from his speech “The World House,” taken from Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (1967):
One of the great liabilities of history is that all to many people fail to remain awake throughout great periods of social change. Every society has its protectors of the status quo and its fraternities of the indifferent who are notorious for sleeping through revolutions. But today our very survival depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant and to face the challenge of change. The large house in which we live demands that we transform this world-wide neighborhood into a world-wide brotherhood. Together we must learn to live as brothers or together we will be forced to perish as fools.
Second, here he is on the real purpose of education, something he wrote to Morehouse College in 1948, and something we should keep in mind as we enter a presidential election year built on GOP spin.
Education must also train one for quick, resolute and effective thinking. To think incisively and to think for one’s self is very difficult. We are prone to let our mental life become invaded by legions of half truths, prejudices, and propaganda. At this point, I often wonder whether or not education is fulfilling its purpose. A great majority of the so-called educated people do not think logically and scientifically. Even the press, the classroom, the platform, and the pulpit in many instances do not give us objective and unbiased truths. To save man from the morass of propaganda, in my opinion, is one of the chief aims of education. Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction.
The function of education, therefore, is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals.
Think on both of those, people, as you go forth and conquer.
