Wornie Reed, director of the Race and and Social Policy Center at Virginia Tech and a participant in the civil rights movement, echoes that idea. “It wasn’t because he was saying people need to ride at the front of buses or be able to sit down and buy hamburgers anywhere they want.” “All of those things got him killed,” he adds. “We have been programmed as a society to focus on elements of the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech because it reduces him to just a dreamer… as opposed to a radical and a revolutionary,” Martin Luther King III says, referring to his father’s calls for a radical redistribution of wealth and a living wage - issues that he thinks are among the most important problems still facing society today. That’s also the speech the King children consider when trying to stop what they see as the sanitizing of their father’s message. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. “I have a dream that enough is enough, and that this should be a gun-free world.” Martin Luther King III said she came up with the words herself, having heard her grandfather’s speech many times before.įor your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. “My grandfather had a dream that his four little children will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character,” she said to a crowd of hundreds of thousands. His 9-year-old daughter, Yolanda Renee King, the only grandchild of Martin Luther King Jr., spoke at the March for Our Lives last month to call for an end to gun violence. He is planning to launch an initiative this year promoting nonviolence with members of Mahatma Gandhi’s and Nelson Mandela’s families.
When he thinks about the renewed threat of nuclear war amid tensions with North Korea, he remembers his father’s warning that the alternative to nonviolence is nonexistence. “I think a culture of nonviolence will help create the condition where poverty is unacceptable, where racism is way behind us and not something that we have to deal with on a frequent basis, and where militarism and violence are reduced almost to be nonexistent,” he told TIME.
Her older brother, Martin Luther King III, a human rights and civil rights activist, focuses on what his father once called the “triple evils” of poverty, racism and militarism. She is most drawn to sharing his beliefs on nonviolence - “one of the greatest aspects of his legacy.” And she sees it as her primary responsibility now to “bring along others to embrace it as a lifestyle,” visiting schools and speaking to students about nonviolence through the King Center. Center for Nonviolent Social Change and speaking out on issues from gun control and voting rights to climate change and President Trump’s rhetoric.īernice King, a minister who has served as CEO of the King Center since 2012, set out to study her father’s work later in life, seeking guidance on the problems facing the country today. (Yolanda King, their sister, died in 2007.) They’ve each done that in their own ways, switching off as leaders of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Since then, his four children, three of whom are alive today, have faced the challenge of growing up without their father and within his shadow, becoming their own people while carrying on his legacy and that of their mother, who died in 2006.
Wednesday marks 50 years since Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.
0 kommentar(er)
