Martin Luther King, Jr. Day of National Service: January 17, 2022
From the Desk of the Human Rights & Social Justice Advisor
Martin Luther King, Jr. Day of National Service
January 17, 2022
“The Tranquilizing Drug of Gradualism”
Summer came, and the weather was beautiful. But the climate, the social climate of American life, erupted into lightning flashes, trembled with thunder, and vibrated to the relentless, growing rain of protest coming to life through the land. Explosively, America’s third revolution – the [1963] Negro Revolution – had begun. (King, 1964)
What a telling example of how African American life in America is different yet so much the same. The same words that the Rev Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. used to describe the racial climate in America in 1963 could be applied 57 years later to the public demands for change that were reignited in 2020 with George Floyd’s brutal murder!