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Tayari's Blog: King After The March On Washingston

Posted by TayariJones on January 18, 2010 10:16 AM
Filed under Current Events

Dr. Vincent Harding remembers Dr. King.:

Perhaps if we follow King carefully enough, we will realize that the official statement of the March on Washington in 1963 said, “This is a march for jobs and freedom." Not for little children to hold each other’s hands, wonderful though that may be, but for their mothers and fathers to be able to work. If we keep going with King, we can more adequately take on the issues of our coming century.

For instance, we may understand how King went out from the sunlight of the Mall to retrace his steps back to Birmingham, Alabama. There, just three weeks later, he was forced to deal with the fact that white terrorist bombers had destroyed a church and the lives of four children.

If we keep going with King, we go into some very tough places. But anybody who is not ready for tough places, isn’t ready for the twenty-first century in America. So I was want to wonder out loud: what was on his mind when he went back to the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and knew that that church had not been chosen accidentally; it has been bombed because it was the headquarters of the campaign that he and Shuttleworth had led in Birmingham, and those children were his responsibility. How do you deal with that?

I would like us to move with King in such a way that we take on the difficult questions that a woman or man has to deal with when trying to give leadership in transforming a society that usually does not want to be transformed.

--Dr. Vincent Harding, former King speechwriter and confidant.
(source)