Nation Honors MLK Jr.’s Memory & Achievements

The likeness of Martin Luther King, Jr. emerges from carved stone,
as viewed from streetside on a November day  in 2011.

One of the best and most balanced tributes to the life and times of Martin Luther King, Jr. is the one which I first read last Thursday in the print edition of the Courier News.

Tucked away on page B6 under Matters of Faith was a column entitled “Move beyond race wars,” written by the Reverend Dr. DeForest B. Soaries, Jr., a well-known personage in Somerset County and beyond.  (He is the Senior Pastor of the First Baptist Church of Lincoln Gardens.)

In his piece, Soaries revealed an admirable trait which, I believe was also shared by MLK, Jr. – that is, the ability to seek peaceful, yet, if necessary, forceful solutions to some of the most obdurate problems which America has faced.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Draws Many

A view of the Martin Luther King, Jr.,
sculpture near the Tidal Basin,
Washington, D.C.

On a quiet Saturday afternoon after Thanksgiving Day, the most visited of the memorials that we came upon near the Tidal Basin in the nation’s Capital was the one recently dedicated to the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr., the peaceful, yet forceful advocate for civil rights in America.  For his approach, as has happened to others of his period, he was rewarded with assassination. 
 
Upon entering the Memorial’s site, you will pass between two towering blocks of stone, before you walk past another two of the same size.  From one of the four carved blocks of stone juts the full, imposing figure of a sculpted MLK standing resolutely, his gaze steadily focused ahead.
 
What you may not immediately observe until you have passed by the four stone carvings and then turn around is the granite wall which slopes behind the four stone monoliths, and extends from both sides of the Memorial’s entrance, to its left and to its right. 
 
It is reminiscent of the Vietnam War Memorial, and each of its panels has inscribed in it an aphorism from the writings of MLK.
 
There are many of them, but one of my favorites is the one carved into the first panel on the right side.  It reads simply, “True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice.”

Martin Luther King, Jr., a Prophet for all Seasons

A prophet is a person with deep moral insight, a quality sometimes accompanied with an exceptional power of expression – character traits very rarely bundled up into the psyche of any one person. When they are combined, those leadership qualities propel a person inexorably to the fore, and societies can change forever. Martin Luther King, Jr.was just such a man.

But a prophet enters at his own risk into a very dangerous profession indeed: Not everybody is ready to hear the message that comes along with the person: The message usually implies structural change within an organization or in society, and that can be threatening and costly for people, even if the change is to the good.

King was born in 1929 and was destined to enter his productive years in the 1960’s, a time of enormous turmoil and fermentation on many fronts in the American scene.

This American black man employed the medium of non-violence and civil disobedience to deliver his message, a notion established a long time ago in the early years of our republic by Henry David Thoreau. It would be for Martin Luther King, Jr. to apply it to the accumulated injustices of the 1960’s that had held back so many Americans for so long.

When MLK accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo in 1964 he said, “I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality.” That can be a tough one to swallow, but King put his life on the line for it.