We celebrate the life of Martin Luther King because all of us are here and are affected by this one single soul’s actions. Every single one of us. As you look around the world today, the whole world is affected by the contribution of Martin Luther King. A couple weeks ago, a woman was elected president of Liberia, right? And then another one was elected president of Chile, wasn’t it? All of this emphasizes the fact the cause of the spirit of people joining together to believe in themselves. People of all kinds of every genre in life, because of Martin Luther King believed that they can achieve.
I do not remember any formal meeting of Martin Luther King. I don’t know when I didn’t know him. For I grew up as a little boy in the kitchen of his parents when he and his sister Christine and his brother AD were like siblings and we were all in the same church family. I was baptized by Rev. King, Sr. when I was eight years old and in the absence of my father, he was the one who was there to help me make all of the decisions for every event of my life until 1984 when he died.

Did you march with Martin Luther King? Yes, but so did hundreds of thousands of other people. That is not my relationship. My relationship is one who was literally born in the bowels of the Civil Rights Movement before there was any fame to Martin Luther King, Jr. It was Havelock Ellis who wrote, “For a brief space, it is granted to us if we will to enlighten the darkness that surrounds our path and we press forward torch in hand along the path and soon from behind comes a runner who will out pace us. All our skill lies in giving it to his hand, the living torch. Bright and un-flickering as we ourselves disappear in the darkness.”

We are reminded that Martin Luther King, Jr. was a runner. He was runner for freedom, for dignity, for faith, for equality, for all of those things that would bring a quality of life for every person created on God’s earth. As we stop to remember him, we are reminded that every single one of us is affected by this runner. We are here to talk about our response to the runner. He wasn’t a dreamer. You wake up from a dream. You don’t determine your dreams. Sometimes you may remember them. Sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you don’t want to remember them. But he was a visionary. A runner who had a vision that one day all of us would be able to live in a world where it didn’t matter what the color of our skin was. You know, at sixty-seven years old, I still have to look over my shoulder in my car. At sixty-seven years old, I still can get on an elevator and have a white woman get on the elevator and hold her pocketbook. I can be dressed just like this.

But I want to remind us that we have not responded enough. I challenge you to be responders. To be those who will respond to the lessons and the work and the ministry and the running of Martin Luther King, Jr. You are in the most exciting time of your life. You are where the action can take place. This is a university. It is a place of thought and ideas. It is a place of action. In the 1950s when I went to college, I used to say in the 19 and let everybody fill in what it was, but I will be brave enough to say the 1950s for when I graduated from Morehouse in 1961. But the world was a far different place then. For those of us who gathered together to try and do something about the world and make it a better place, we lived in a different world.

Today’s world is about personal success. And we grew up in a time where it was about what you do for others. I look back sometimes and I think about some of the times and some of the things that we have done. My son asks me some time, “Dad, how did you folk dare to go out and do some of the things that you did?” and I said, “That is what we were raised to do.” People have asked how did Martin Luther King, Jr. get his spirit to do certain things. He was taught that. It did not originate with him. Everybody who came right along in that period within the churches, we all learned exactly the same thing – you are going to be something. It doesn’t matter whether you cannot ride the bus and sit up front. It does not matter whether you can go into Thompson Lee downtown and try on shoes. It does not matter whether you can go and have a hamburger at the lunch counter. But what does matter is that you have the right to begin to bring about some effective change. How much of that are we hearing today?

Our times created for us the drive that would allow us as students to dress ourselves up neatly and to go into the restaurants and the places downtown knowing that we could have been beaten with clubs. We were students and we had a cause. We were responding to what we were learning from Martin Luther King and the people of Montgomery, Alabama. The kind of conditions we grew up in, sure they were different, but we were taught that we had to keep moving. Mickey Grant, some years ago, had a Broadway hit called Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope. And it started with a pulsating hymn, which had the gospel singer singing, “We got to keep moving. We got to keep moving. We got to keep pushing. We got to keep running until we move on in.” We don’t have enough of that spirit now to be involved and to care about what is happening. Now that is the era that I come from. That is the era that produced Martin Luther King.
We talk about what college students can do. You know what we did? Here you are at the University of Virginia and we were at little Negro schools – Spelman and Morehouse and Clark-Atlanta University in Atlanta and we didn’t have the facilities or anything, but we dared, two or three of us. And then about thirteen of us decided that we ought to be able to do something to make a difference and we started meeting and we went to our college presidents and we began to come up with strategies and we planned; it was probably one of the most skillful, laid out, strategic plans of a student body, student bodies combined that we had had thus far. And that was part of the sit-ins.

My face became the photo face of the student movement, the poster face. On the Atlanta Journal, the Five Star Final, at five thirty. On the Five Star Final pink edition where no Negro had been on the front page on the Atlanta Journal, this face was up there with police standing over me. Was I scared? Of course, but that wasn’t the motivating moment because we knew we were doing right.

What did Martin Luther King do? Martin Luther King took a look at all of this. What did he see? He saw not only people having to do, carry out secondary actions in terms of riding the buses. How many of you understand fully what the situation was in Montgomery? Some people don’t I find and I am not going to assume that you do, but Rosa Parks and all the Negroes would have to get on the bus, put their money in, get off the bus and walk back to the middle door, get on the bus and then take a back seat. And sometimes if the bus drivers were onerate, they would just pull off and leave you standing there after you had put your money in.

We could not go to any schools together. In Atlanta when I first started off, there were two high schools. Booker T. Washington High School first and then David T. Howard High School so you went to either or. And wherever you lived, you passed several white schools in between, but there was no such thing as going to the same schools. There was no such thing as going into the restaurants. There was no such thing as being considered for a job, even as a salesperson at a dime store. I am just trying in a quick way to let you understand that all of this was different before Martin Luther King, Jr. Most of us don’t think about that, do we? Because we don’t know what it’s like to not be able to go around to McDonald’s, go to Burger King, be able to go stay at the Marriott Court Hotel or to go to any of these other places because you can do it. But my brothers and sisters, keep your ears and your eyes open because we are living in a time where the religious wrong, hear what I said? The religious wrong are often doing little things that subtly cover up their actions, but many people still see us the same way.

I was on my way driving out here from Virginia Beach and I saw a car riding along the road and it had a Confederate flag on it and it said if you don’t like this than leave the country. Can you imagine that? What it symbolized for all of us and I say that to us my friends because it is us. Never forget that whatever affects one of us affects all of us. Maybe not today, but it will. A trickle-down. The moans and groans of freedom were heard during the time of Martin Luther King. Some of us have come to the point, I don’t think we have any kind of end goal in terms of other people. It’s about us. How many of us in choosing our careers are saying I want to make sure I am doing something that is going to be for the good of other people? Or are we saying I want to make me six figures? And there is nothing wrong with making six figures if you are going to share it. Are you still thinking of other people?

I was in 7-11 a few weeks ago and this was the funniest thing. This man was buying a whole series of lottery tickets. He must have spent about twenty-five or thirty dollars on those tickets. It was the big winner. I said, “Brother don’t you know it only takes one to win?” He was spending all of this money and I said, “If you got that money, what would you do if you won the money?” He said, “I would buy me, I would buy me…” I said, “What would do for me?” And he just laughed. I didn’t know him. We were just standing in the line waiting to pay for our goods, but my point is what is it that we are doing for others? Martin Luther King’s whole life was spent for others. He had very little personal time. He had no privacy. No personal freedom.

One of the things that have come out is that one of the major things that we did and he did Civil Rights Movement was to register to vote. You know right here in Virginia, there used to be poll taxes. Did you know that? Where they would charge you to register to vote and then in other parts of the South, they would ask you so many questions that they couldn’t even answer themselves. Anything to keep you from voting. And you know, we are not voting.

In 1994, I worked in South Africa as one of those advanced people who prepared people to register to vote for the election of Nelson Mandela. I was assigned to a courtyard downtown in Johannesburg watching the lines and you should have seen these people. Never saying a word. As quiet as a teacher said, “Put your hand over your mouth.” But they were in circles. And the courtyard sometimes was no bigger than half of this room. And they would be just circled around waiting for their turn to go in to vote. So two incidents I will give to you to show you how important it is.

One young lady came out screaming. Crying. And I thought something had happened and so I said, “What’s wrong?” And she said in her broken English, “I go to my grandmother’s grave” and I said “What?” and she said, “I voted. I go to tell my grandmother.” Can you imagine that happening here? People suffered and died in order for people to vote.

In this same yard a tall Dutch white woman came over to me. And you are standing there with your I.D., of course an American flag, a picture I.D., and some other things so they know who you are. And she came over to me out of a line waiting to go and vote and she said, “Would you mind,” I mean beautiful English, “if I took you picture. You have one of the kindest faces I have every seen.” And I said, “My picture?” She said, “Yes. We are so grateful for what you are doing.” She said, “Please, this is my grandson and my granddaughter” and she brought these two kids over and she wanted to make a picture. And she said, “We knew this was right all the time, but we were afraid to do anything.” How many of us are willing to be like Martin Luther King and just to take a stand for something? She was afraid. A lot of them were afraid. But Martin Luther King exemplified fearlessness in the face of a fearful situation. You think he wasn’t afraid? Do you think any of us were not afraid? Of course we feared, but that wasn’t what claimed our attention. Sure I may be killed. Sure I may be shot down, but what is the most important thing? It’s that our people gain the right to register to vote.

What is your response when it comes to voting? A way that we can help to change everything continuously. We’ve made our standing progress since Martin Luther King, but we’ve got a long way still to go. When we think about voting, it’s a blessing and a privilege, but most of us don’t even vote. Think about it. We don’t vote. Some of us do, but most of us don’t.

How many of us are concerned about what happens to our brothers and our sisters on the streets that we don’t even know? On Courtland Street, at a big named hotel in Atlanta some years ago, there was a guy standing there. You know how they say, “Brother, can I have…I am hungry. Can I have just something to get me a hamburger?” And a lot of times, we say they are just going to go around the corner and buy some drugs. This fellow didn’t look as raggedy as some. He didn’t look dirty. He didn’t have any odor about him and I said, “Son, how did you get down here?” He said, “I came here out of Maryland. I was supposed to be going to Georgia State College, but I haven’t been in this last semester. I don’t have a job. I don’t have any food.” I just stopped and talked to him. I said, “Now you could be handing me a line, couldn’t you?” But I said, “Okay. I am going right across over here to the Hilton and I am about to have some lunch.” I was at a meeting. I said it is an open lobby in there and I said he can’t do anything to me. I said I tell you what you do, “Would you have lunch with me?” He looked at me funny. I said, “Yes.” So he said, “Okay.” I said, “Come on. We are going across the street and we are going to sit down at this restaurant and we are going to have lunch.” Do you know that boy sat and talked, but that was a moving experience for me because nobody had paid him any attention. They thought like I did. That he was just trying to get some money from them to go maybe buy some drugs or to just to buy him something to drink. I always like to say, you know what the drunk always says don’t you? “I’ll drink to that.” I thought maybe he was looking for something to drink. But he actually sat down and we had a great time.

My brothers and sisters, how many of us today are daring to care what happens to somebody else or is it all about us? Martin Luther King Jr. lived a life that calls him to be concerned about the whole person. Osceola Ware Curry was a woman. Some of you might know her if you have read. But in the department store on 125th street, came up and tried to have a conversation with him and he got interested in talking to her and she took a knife, a blade and pierced him in the chest and it almost ruptured his aorta and the doctors later told him, you probably have heard him talk about some of this, later told him that if he had sneezed, he would have died. Those were the kinds of risks that were taken all the time. How many of us have dared to take a risk to do anything?

As I moved on toward the end of these thoughts, my brothers and sisters, how are we responding to the vision, the dream that Martin Luther King spoke about? You are living in one of the most exciting periods of your life. You are here now where you can be allowed to change or to help to bring about change in the world. Not by going out leading in a movement. You don’t have to march anywhere necessarily. But you do have to willing to show your care and concern and when the role is called for someone to stand up when it is needed, you say wait a minute, you can count on me, here’s my name.

I am simply saying my brothers and my sisters that Martin Luther King, Jr. tried to build a world or to share in the building of a world where all of us would be able to sit down at the University of Virginia and to be able to share in classes and in meals and discussions and protests and successes and studies so that we might all be able to live as respected human beings with dignity. We must produce whatever it is that is necessary to break down the walls that separate all of us and that’s what Martin Luther King was about.

All of you have heard probably about his last night how he talked about his death and about how he had been to the mountaintop and I often think about that because he had said that on many occasions. That wasn’t the only time he had said that. There had often been threats and you never knew when it was going to happen. But he knew it would happen, but there was in that statement, the hope that one day, even though he didn’t see it, he would see you folk here at the University of Virginia. He would see people joining hands. Little black girls and white girls and brown boys and yellow boys and everybody joining together and just living in the world where no one has to be over the top of the other and that is your challenge. The urgency is for now. Tomorrow is not promised. Yesterday is over. Now is the time.