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The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t mean that much to me when I was growing up. I was only 3 years old when he was taken from this world, and school textbooks took years to catch up to just how influential he was – and not just in the black community, but in all communities.
In college, one of my classes was once tasked with writing an essay on someone we admired who was from a different background than ourselves. At the urging of my grandmother, I picked King. Grandma grew up on a farm in rural Kentucky where, as she put it, everybody was too poor to worry about the color of anyone’s skin; they only cared if you were a good person and had a good crop.
In researching King’s life and work, it was difficult not to be overwhelmed by the sheer weight of his speeches. His elegantly composed and passionately delivered words were about things I had barely read about and never experienced firsthand. It opened my mind to an entire part of our country that I had only seen in part due to school integration, and it showed me that everyone did not have equal access to the American dream.
Yet, despite many injustices, King encouraged everyone to be the best version of themselves. “Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred,” he said during his famous “I Have a Dream” speech on Aug. 28, 1963. “We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plain of dignity and discipline.”
Since then – as part of not just my faith and profession, but in our shared humanity – I have tried to promote racial equality and, at the same time, point out when it’s not present. Several years ago, a drunken (and soon-to-be former) town manager was run out of a local bar while spewing racial epithets, just one sad example of how far King’s dream still has to go in order to be realized.
The 30th annual Martin Luther King Jr. Prayer Breakfast was held Monday morning in the Texana Community Center, with a diverse crowd that should be been bigger remembering the late civil rights leader with the theme, “Living the Dream: It Starts With Me – Spreading Hope, Courage and Unity.” Starting the best breakfast you could eat for five bucks, you couldn’t help but leave feeling both filled and fulfilled.
The speaker, the Rev. Charles Lee, has a strong resume. Tenth of 11 children. U.S. Army veteran. University of North Carolina in Asheville graduate. Pastor of Liberty Baptist Church in Sylva. Past moderator of Waynesville Missionary Baptist Association. Past president of the Jackson County NAACP.
And Lee did all that while working 30 years for the City of Asheville Parks & Recreation Department. He told us, “Don’t miss your moment to launch out. We miss too many precious moments by being consumed with our own self-interest,” which is excellent advice.
Lee also explained something about the two beams making a cross that I hadn’t heard before. “We are happy to preach vertically,” he said of some churches about the beam on the cross looking toward God, “but then step on the horizontal one (the beam on the cross representing humanity).”
“In God’s kingdom,” he simply put it, “no one should be left out.”
Amen to that. As Ann Woodford put it, “It was so uplifting to be with you this morning.” At least for a couple hours, we got to see what the world could look like if we all just accepted one another as brothers and sisters in the human race.
David Brown is publisher of the Cherokee Scout. Call him at 828-837-5122 or email dbrown@cherokeescout.com.