It is a pleasure to be with you today in this historic place of worship to remember and honor the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Dr. King led the historic crusade to open the American Dream to all people. He was steadfast in his beliefs, committed to peaceful persuasion, and he opened doors that we must work daily to keep open.
Dr. King is rightly remembered as the leader of the civil rights movement, but his legacy goes far beyond that. Through his words and his actions, he led a movement to make us more loving, more charitable, more peaceful, more hopeful—more human. He believed—as we must all continue to believe—that the world outside can be made better when the people inside strive to be better.
On April 3, 1968 Dr. King stood up at rally for a sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis, Tennessee, and though he did not know it, gave the last speech of his life. In that speech, Doctor King said that if God had given him the opportunity to live during any period of time in the course of human history, he would choose to live in the second half of the twentieth century.
He acknowledged that on the face of it, this seemed to be a strange choice. Why would anyone choose to live in a time and place where oppression and confusion infected not only our nation, but the entire world as well?
In that last speech, Dr. King said simply that he saw something happening in the world, “… the reason that I’m happy to live in this period is that we have been forced to a point where we’re going to have to grapple with the problems that men have been trying to grapple with through history, but the demands didn’t force them to do it.” Dr. King saw that the violence, oppression, and indecency that he and millions of his fellow Americans were forced to endure and he demanded opportunity and progress for a nation and its people.
He knew that by improving ourselves as individuals we make the world around us a better place. He reminded us that “Civilization and violence are antithetical concepts.” And that only by forsaking the violence and bigotry within our hearts could Americans transform our society into one where people could truly live as men and women created equal and judged “not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”
It is not easy to do what Dr. King did—to confront challenges that seem insurmountable. But that is exactly what he did. And that is what inspires us today. Nearly 39 years after his death, his words still resonate, his example still illuminates, and his standards still motivate.
Like Dr. King, we must believe that by improving ourselves, we can make this world a better place. Like Dr. King, we must live our own lives with a spirit of what he called, “dangerous unselfishness,” where we are able to place the welfare of those around us above our own self-interests. We must pass that spirit of “dangerous unselfishness” to the generation that follows us. And to that generation we must pass on the lessons that he taught during his lifetime. When he accepted the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1964, Dr. King made this powerful statement: “I accept this award today with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind. I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history.” Our children must learn to refuse to accept despair, and they must learn to have faith in the future of mankind. We teach those lessons by example in our own lives.
Today we celebrate the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a life that continues to teach us to strive to be better than we are, creating a better world. One look at the world around us today could give any of us cause for despair, but rather than despair, we must follow Dr. King’s example; we must have faith in our fellow man, faith in our ourselves, and know, as Dr. King knew, that in each and every one of us, we have the capacity to overcome our flaws and make the world a better place—one person, one family, one neighborhood, and one country at a time.
Courthouse 