Accents
For dreams must live
"I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed." That was Martin Luther King, Jr., a dreamer for his people, speaking in 1963 to an international assembly estimated to be more than 200,000 at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. His dream: "equal justice for all citizens under the law" -- a stirring inspiration not only for his fellow black Americans but also for other oppressed people in the world.
Monday, Jan. 15, was Martin Luther King's Day, and here in Bluffton, South Carolina, where the family of my daughter Randy resides, hundreds marched to keep that dream alive and well. Not just 200,000 but thousands upon thousands in all of America celebrated to honor Martin Luther King, Jr., the great civil rights activist. Martin Luther King's Day is a red-letter day in the US calendar.
I remember a visit to San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center two years or so ago where I took shots of quotations from Martin Luther King, Jr. These are engraved in panels of concrete behind a man-made waterfall. It is Yerba Buena's main attraction where the roar of the falling water echoes the strength of conviction in the quotes from the civil rights champion, to wit:
"No, no we are not satisfied and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream." Below this is the place where and when he made the speech: Washington, D.C., 1963. And from his San Francisco address delivered in 1956 at the height of racism: "I believe that the day will come when all God's children from bass black to treble white will be significant on the constitution's keyboard."
Gunned down at age 39 in 1968 in support of striking union workers, King voiced out prophetic lines: "Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its fate but I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will and if it allowed me to go up the mountain and I took over and I'd seen the promised land, I cannot go there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get the promise." Deeply mourned, his death brought to fulfillment the promise as shown in the respect accorded to African Americans and in the positions of authority many of them occupy.
Behind the flowing water at Yerba Buena are excerpts from other speeches translated in different languages for the benefit of tourists. One has characters that looked Chinese to us. One looking similar to it we took to be Japanese. Another with proliferation of dots we thought to be Arabic. But one panel is unmistakably ours, yes, in beautiful Filipino: "Ngayon ay panahon ng pagbabago. Sa lahat ng dako ng daigdig ang mga mamamayan ay naghihimagsik laban sa mga makalumang pamamara-an ng pagsasamantala at pang-aapi at mula sa sinapupunan ng marupok na daigdig ay isinisilang ang mga bagong pamamara-an ng katarungan at pagkapantay-pantay. Ngayon higit kailan man ang mga mamamayang dati-dati ay walang lakas at walang malay ay natutong makipaglaban." The very words that could come from our own idealistic young: Rizal and Bonifacio of long ago; Lean Alejandro, Edgar Jopson, Emmanuel Lacaba--all of Martial Law vintage; and several others under the Arroyo regime who, like Martin Luther King, Jr., were victims of violent death.
King's speech reverberated in the world community when he received the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1964: "I accept the Nobel Prize for Peace at a moment when twenty-two million Negroes of the United States of America are engaged in a creative battle to end the long night of racial injustice I accept this prize on behalf of all men who love peace and brotherhood... I accept this award in the spirit of a curator of some precious heirloom...for its true owners--all those to whom beauty is truth and truth beauty--and in whose eyes the beauty of genuine brotherhood and peace is more precious than diamonds or silver or gold." Sterling words from the eloquent Baptist minister turned human rights activist.
And so, all over America thousands upon thousands continue to march every Martin Luther King's Day because dreams must live--dreams for people like Martin Luther King, Jr. to espouse and safeguard because insidious injustice, iniquities, and inequalities continue to hold sway in many lives.
(Comments to lagoc@hargray.com)