Dr. King's Dream

1. Martin Luther King "I have a dream"

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3. In the wake of the civil rights movement in which Dr. King was so dramatically used, there came a flood of social programs that sought to address the causes and consequences of racism. Cultural education, cross cultural dialogue, and the current multi-culturalism all hearken back to the civil rights movement for their mandates

4. Tensions continue, and regularly we hear of yet another incident somewhere in our country where race is presented as a precipitating factor.

5. The lingering vestiges of America's past racism remain a serious challenge to our hope for a nation that lives out its most cherished values - liberty and justice for all.

6. It has been decades since the 1963 March on Washington where Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech was delivered. Yet none of us can say we have fully lived up to Dr. King's vision of a land where each person would be judged by the content of their character, rather than the color of their skin.

7. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. led the civil rights movement and fought for racial equality with something much stronger than tolerance.

8. Born as Michael King Jr. on January 15, 1929, Martin Luther King Jr. was the middle child of Michael King Sr. and Alberta Williams King. The King and Williams families were rooted in rural Georgia. Martin Jr.'s grandfather, A.D. Williams, was a rural minister for years and then moved to Atlanta in 1893. He took over the small, struggling Ebenezer Baptist church with around 13 members and made it into a forceful congregation. He married Jennie Celeste Parks and they had one child that survived, Alberta. Michael King Sr. came from a sharecropper family in a poor farming community

9. April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. is fatally shot while standing on the balcony outside his second-story room at theLorraine Motelin Memphis, Tennessee. The civil rights leader was in Memphis to support a sanitation workers’ strike and was on his way to dinner when a bullet struck him in the jaw and severed his spinal cord. King was pronounced dead after his arrival at a Memphis hospital. He was 39 years old.

10. Dr. King's words still ring true today. We can give new life to "The Dream," following the path of Dr. King. Our path may not lead to martyrdom by an assassin's bullet as it did for Martin Luther King, but it does lead to dying to our selfish ways and self-sufficiency. Such a faith is not a weak-kneed, escapist religious exercise, but a courageous pursuit of that which is ultimately good, right and true.

11. Martin Luther king says "At the center of the Christian faith is the affirmation that there is a God in the universe who is the ground and essence of all reality. A Being of infinite love and boundless power, God is the creator, sustainer, and conserver of values....In contrast to the ethical relativism of [totalitarianism], Christianity sets forth a system of absolute moral values and affirms that God has placed within the very structure of this universe certain moral principles that are fixed and immutable."

12. In the pursuit of the rights of various groups, under the civil rights umbrella, one thing has become clear. That which was called right by one group is often called wrong by another. Rather than resolving the differences, tolerance is championed as the appropriate response to the varying perspectives that have emerged. Yet tolerance has no cohesive nor healing power in society. It means little more than leaving one another alone. It leads to indifference, not understanding. Tolerance allows the gulfs between us to remain in place. In fact, there is little in the concept of tolerance to pull us away from racial isolation.

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