Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day message from Mayor Ward
Press release from the City of Gainesville
GAINESVILLE, Fla. – Gainesville Mayor Harvey Ward released the following message today:
In February 1956, while leading the Montgomery bus boycott, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. announced the protest was not a conflict between groups of people. It was a conflict between justice and injustice. The goal, in his words, was “to improve the whole of Montgomery.”
Grief at the loss of such a towering moral leader never disappears, and the bright hope he left behind still lights the way. It urges us to never give up, to fix the issues that still trouble our nation and our community: affordable housing, economic development, food security, and access to healthcare.
This year, as we pause in reverence to mark the life and legacy of this great man, we celebrate a project undertaken in his name that improves the whole of Gainesville. The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Garden, long a presence in City Hall Plaza, is reopening today with a ceremonial ribbon-cutting led by the Martin Luther King Jr. Commission of Florida. This dedication of place is yet one more way we carry the dream forward.
Sincerely,
Harvey
“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
MLK
If you believe…..then live it out and show the next generation how its done.
Let’s make the whole speech available:
https://www.npr.org/2010/01/18/122701268/i-have-a-dream-speech-in-its-entirety
Today, as we look back on this momentous point in history—let’s also put into perspective how the very thing we’ve managed to become better at is what some leaders want to ignore with their own policies.
Hey Harv, get MLK’s out of your mouth
Chill out. He posts a short message for all observed holidays.
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation:
*****where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.*****”
The following is an excerpt from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s final essay, A Testament of Hope:
People are often surprised to learn that I am an optimist. They know how often I have been jailed, how frequently the days and nights have been filled with frustration and sorrow, how bitter and dangerous are my adversaries. They expect these experiences to harden me into a grim and desperate man.
They fail, however, to perceive the sense of affirmation generated by the challenge of embracing struggle and surmounting obstacles. They have no comprehension of the strength that comes from faith in God and man.
It is possible for me to falter, but I am profoundly secure in my knowledge that God loves us; he has not worked out a design for our failure. Man has the capacity to do right as well as wrong, and his history is a path upward, not downward.
The past is strewn with the ruins of the empires of tyranny, and each is a monument not merely to man’s blunders but to his capacity to overcome them. While it is a bitter fact that in America in 1968, I am denied equality solely because I am black, yet I am not a chattel slave. Millions of people have fought thousands of battles to enlarge my freedom; restricted as it still is, progress has been made.
This is why I remain an optimist, though I am also a realist, about the barriers before us. Why is the issue of equality still so far from solution in America, a nation that professes itself to be democratic, inventive, hospitable to new ideas, rich, productive and awesomely powerful?
The problem is so tenacious because, despite its virtues and attributes, America is deeply racist and its democracy is flawed both economically and socially. All too many Americans believe justice will unfold painlessly or that its absence for black people will be tolerated tranquilly. Justice for black people will not flow into society merely from court decisions nor from fountains of political oratory. Nor will a few token changes quell all the tempestuous yearnings of millions of disadvantaged black people.
White America must recognize that justice for black people cannot be achieved without radical changes in the structure of our society. The comfortable, the entrenched, the privileged cannot continue to tremble at the prospect of change in the status quo.