A week before his assassination, King told performer and activist Harry Belafonte that he worried the civil rights movement was “integrating into a burning house.” But when Belafonte asked what they should do, King replied, “I guess we're just going to have to become firemen.”
3 comments:
He managed to not demonize those with whom he disagreed-- and at that time, the disagreements were as major as today. Putting out a crowd fire means being able to stick to the issues and show why they are better. Today too often a fire is exactly what some want with vitriol and name calling. We don't have the kind of leaders to start a movement that will solve problems. I guess those are rare :(
And then after leaving here, I read this. Maybe I've been forgetting MLK. Of course, the author, Cornel West, is a flamethrower ;) Martin Luther King.
The journalist Gary Younge makes an observation that I think is important in our reflections about Dr. King: "Reputations forged in revolutionary periods can rarely be sustained through calmer times." Times change -- "new occasions teach new duties" as James Russell Lowell wrote in abolitionist times. A symptom of human greatness might be that people in different times keep finding something, even if a new something, in people who went before.
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