the fierce urgency of now

"We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quick sands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children. ...and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream. ... I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together." 

(The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., 28 August 1963 in Washington, D.C.)

beyond sesquicentennial memory

Remembering fifty (and a hundred plus) years ago....

"The pale history books in Harlem and Birmingham told how the nation had fought a war over slavery. Abraham Lincoln had signed a document that would come to be known as the Emancipation Proclamation. The war had been won but not a just peace. Equality had never arrived. Equality was a hundred years late. 

"The boy and the girl knew more than history. They knew something about current events. ... They knew that, for years, their own lawyers had won great victories in the courts which were not being translated into reality. 

"They were seeing on television, hearing from the radio, reading in the newspapers that this was the one-hundredth birthday of their freedom. ... But freedom had a dull ring, a mocking emptiness...." 

--excerpt(s) from the Introduction in "Why We Can't Wait", Martin Luther King, Jr.