A little known fact about me: I have always been captivated by Martin Luther King, Jr and love when his birthday comes around! PS He "turned" 82 years old on Saturday...Anyhow, my excitement is not for having a day off from work, but rather all the past 25 years of media attention that *hopefully* reminds people of the achievements and missions of Dr. King.
As we're all educated adults, I won't bore you with all of his achievements and famous quotes because we should be plenty aware of them by now...but I did post my favorite quote of his at the very beginning of this blog. As our society is continually changing there is a constant uproar over immigration and civil marriages--and plenty of hateful, ignorant words to go with the debates. Frankly, it makes me sick to my stomach when people feel they have the right to say such hurtful things. As any Christian has been taught, it is not us who shall judge but rather it is God who will judge our thoughts, words and deeds on our last day. And it makes me even more sick when people so full of hate use Christianity as their crutch. How hard is it to love one another?! Whenever I hear such judgmental comments I always mentally refer myself to the quote above.
Back to the subject at hand as that's ^ a tangent that I could stay on for awhile...It's fair to say that a lot of my moral and social attitudes have been shaped by Dr. King and his works. I have always been fascinated with how someone so young could stand up in the face of adversity and selflessly work to make a change in society's attitudes and policies. Even though his life was stopped early, his accomplishments still live on :-)
During my Sophomore year of college, I went down to Alabama to visit my sister for Spring Break and told Mom that we HAD to go to Birmingham for a day so that I could check out all the historical markers of the Civil Rights movement. Luckily, she was up for the roadtrip! We spent the day touring many of the landmarks such as the capital grounds, the 16th Street Baptist Church, the diners and best of all--the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial. Part of the memorial was an upright semi-circle wall of black marble with a quote etched into it...and on the ground was a circular slab of marble with the words of the "I Have a Dream" speech etched into it. All with water continually streaming over the stone. Random fact #2: this wall was designed by Maya Ying Lin who designed the Vietnam Wall memorial in DC.
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| I couldn't find my other prints, but here is one of the pics that I took at the Memorial |
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| I wish I could claim this picture but I can't! |
I have heard so many people discourage Black History Month and even goes as far as to say it's unfair because we don't have a White History Month....hello, we do--in fact we get 11 solid months of it each year! How ignorant can you be? When you stop and think about the history we are taught in school, 95% of it revolves around white men of European descent and their doings. Where are the other non-White people who contributed to our history? I'm not talking about just Blacks, but also Hispanics, Latinos, Asians and Middle-Easterners. They were all living beside us accomplishing their own pieces of history but we can only talk about it in February??? In my opinion, that's crap.
Be fully prepared to read--or ignore--my postings on Black History during the month of February. I'm not claiming to be a historian by any means but there's always more that we can learn and share with each other. With understanding comes compassion--not fear. As Dr. King once said, "We must learn to live together as brothers or we will perish together as fools."
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