17th Annual Martin Luther King, Jr. NAACP/ACT-SO Breakfast

Gene R. Nichol
January 16, 2006

I'm particularly heartened, and honored, to be part of this tremendous gathering. Celebrating the life, the legacy, and the challenge of America's greatest constitutionalist, Martin Luther King, Jr. The "drum major for justice"—who charged us to drink deeply from the wells dug by the founding fathers in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

I look forward to talking about Dr. King. But also, this morning, we honor a tremendous group of young women and men. Lifting our spirits. Marking their promise. Paying tribute to their accomplishment. Giving heart for the future. I look forward to watching your faces and hearing your stories.

I also, quite selfishly, hope that I might get to know a lot of these honorees at the College of William & Mary. As it happens, in your case, there is no need to go across the nation, or even to leave the neighborhood, to get the best education the world has to offer. I hope, also, that you will consider William & Mary's pre-collegiate summer program in Early American history—which has sessions this summer in June and July. It is a great jump-start on cutting-edge teaching and research. I see Colin Campbell is here—this is a joint effort of Colonial Williamsburg and the College. Take advantage of it.

To the parents—and grandparents of our honorees—let me just say that I have three daughters, also high school age, and so I can imagine some of the pride and excitement you feel. There's nothing like it. I'm guessing these honorees might not always be as perfect as they seem this morning. Or maybe they are. But the measure of hope this morning marks does represent their truest selves. And I know, just like they do, that the strongest single reason they are here—receiving our praise and lifting our hearts—is the energy and effort and patience and guidance and commitment and love you have dedicated to them. I don't know how one could uncover a greater sense of pride than that.

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The recognition of Dr. King's birthday as a federal holiday has proven a marvelous turn. King is the greatest modern spokesman for our core, foundational national ideals. His life, no doubt, is a source of immense pride for black Americans. But he redefined our nation in a way that lifted and ennobled us all. If anyone deserves to be canonized in the name of the American democracy, it is King.

Still, as each January rolls around, I'm inclined to think there are real drawbacks to Dr. King's intense celebrity. The children's posters, the grammar school portraits, the television cameos—they inevitably paint King as a cardboard figure. Sainted, other-worldly, angelic, haloed, bloodless, ascetic. Near divine. Above the fray. From the mountaintop.

But a gradually deified King loses one of his most powerful lessons—the lesson of astonishing, unyielding, and ultimately triumphant moral courage.

Martin Luther King was the human leader of a mass movement; the catalyst of a non-violent struggle—proclaiming that "God is interested in the brotherhood and freedom of the entire human race." And so strong was his commitment to the ideal of equality that he, quite literally, gave up his life for it.

From the moment he assumed leadership of the Montgomery bus boycott, until the day he died in Memphis, King and his family endured constant, graphic, chilling threats. They came at the hands of southern thugs, they came at the hands of organized terrorists; they came, even more tragically, at the hands of his own government.

He was stabbed. He was repeatedly physically assaulted. His house was bombed. His brother's house was bombed. Several of his associates were murdered. Almost every march presented the possibility of sniper fire. Every public appearance offered the danger of attack.

It may seem prescient that he spoke of his death the night before he was assassinated. But he did so frequently. He knew that he would be killed if he continued to stand up for freedom. And continue to stand up he did.

King wrote and spoke movingly of his midnight struggles with fear. Like any mortal, he was scared to die. But he refused to cower. He was not a paper figure—immune from the stains and tensions of human frailty. But he did rise against them. His acts of transcendent courage helped foster a second American revolution—even more notable, and even more daunting to accomplish, than the first. His courage can seem even more lost to us than his language.

And there's something else.

Martin Luther King not only was not a sainted figure, beyond strife and defeat. He was maladjusted.

For King, America was a "dream as yet unfulfilled." But progress toward that dream, he knew, "never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability."

Late in his life, King wrote: "I call upon all persons of good will to be maladjusted. I never did intend to adjust myself" to crushing practices of racial discrimination; or "to economic conditions that take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few."

And looking about us today—in this time, in this place, in this century—Dr. King would surely find much about which to be challenged, to be maladjusted, to be unsatisfied.

For how can we be satisfied, when the richest nation on earth, the richest nation in human history, allows almost 35 million of its citizens to live in stark, unrelenting poverty? Fourteen million of our children? A quarter of all black kids; a third of all Latino children? As if any theory of justice or virtue could explain the exclusion of innocent children from the American dream.

And how can we be satisfied when the most powerful nation on earth allows thousands and thousands of Americans along the Gulf Coast to fall before the tragedies of man and nature—simply because they are poor? As if, in fact, we were not "one nation, under God?"

And how can we be satisfied when over 44 million of us have no health care coverage of any kind? Leaving us alone among the major industrial nations in failing to provide some form of universal coverage. When, as Dr. King argued, inequality in access to health is the most pernicious discrimination of all.

And how can we be satisfied when, 50 years after the majestic phrases of Brown v. Bd. of Education, all over the country schools are rapidly re-segregating. Removing meaningful racial integration from our national agenda. Ignoring Thurgood Marshall's claim before the Supreme Court that "these plaintiffs" seek the most vital right that can be claimed by children—the right "to be treated as entire citizens of the nation into which they have been born."

And how can we be satisfied, when in Virginia and much of the nation, we allow rich and poor public schools? Not just private schools mind you, but rich and poor public schools. As if it were thought acceptable to treat some of our children as second or third class citizens. Our religions teach that all children are equal in the eyes of God. We operate our schools as if we didn't believe it.

And how can we be satisfied, when a study last month concluded that higher education is more economically polarized today than at any time n the past three decades? So that if you come from a family making over $90,000 a year, your chances of getting a college degree by the age 24 are one in two. If your family makes $35,000 or less, the odds are one in seventeen. One in seventeen.

And how can we be satisfied, when my own institution, and other distinguished universities across the commonwealth, still have so much to do to demonstrate, in Justice O'Connor's words, that these distinctive paths to leadership are "visibly open" to all segments of the community.

The frank truth is, if the exclusions and indignities of American race and poverty are right, then the Constitution is wrong.

If the debilitations of those locked at the bottom are acceptable, then our scriptures are wrong.

If these denials of equal citizenship and humanity are permissible, then we pledge allegiance to a cynical illusion, not to a foundational creed.

So here today, with clasped hands, I hope we'll embrace Dr. King's powerful charge of inspiration and challenge. We'll celebrate his call to high citizenship. We'll believe in it. We'll subscribe to it. We'll declare our commitment. We'll enroll our hearts. We'll enlist our spirits. We enlist because….

Somewhere we read, "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all are created equal."

And somewhere we read, that the "central purpose of America is that the weak would gradually be made stronger and ultimately all would have an equal chance."

And somewhere we read that "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

And somewhere we read that "History will judge us on the extent to which we have used our gifts to lighten and enrich the lives of our fellows."

And somewhere we read that "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."

And somewhere we read "We have to believe the things we teach our children, believe them and make them real."

And somewhere we read, that "Whenever you did these things for the least of these, you did them for me."

And somewhere we read, that "You reap what you sow."

And somewhere we read, that the pursuit of justice and the pursuit of happiness can be as one. They march not in opposite directions, but hand in hand.

And somewhere we read, "No, we are not satisfied and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream."