April 4, 1968 Martin Luther King Jr was gunned down while standing on the balcony outside his second-story room at a Motel in Memphis, Tennessee.
His message, and particularly these words “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” in his famous I have a dream speech, show that MLK is still the best possible hope for a city such as Detroit, which suffers while a morally corrupt presence draws it deeper to the depths of ridicule.
But they must first listen.
I often wonder if lyrics, and lifestyles, and culture which praises cop-killing, womanizing, and race baiting hasn’t pushed the good reverend’s message out of “style” in certain areas of our society. It certainly isn’t a good match.
Even the words of the Presidential candidate Barack Obama’s minister Wright seem to conflict with even the last line of MLK’s Dream speech; “And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”
Politically, in some measure were MLK alive today, I may have had differences with him. But a true family man, a man who refused to be a victim, I would still respect him, and his message. Detroit needs to listen to it again.
Today IS A SAD day in history. And sadder yet is ignoring the words of a great man.