Reflections on a "Drum Major for Justice"

Temple University Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Celebration

January 21, 2008

I am moved and inspired by the reflections of my Temple friends and colleagues on the impact of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on their lives and by this incredible video created by Temple student Dike Uzoukwu.  I am both honored and humbled to participate in this afternoon’s celebration of Reverend King’s impact.

I am also honored today to inaugurate a new tradition for Temple. This event has been created to provide an opportunity for reflection and community gathering to consider Dr. King’s memory, spirit and legacy.

Our views about life and the assumptions we come to accept about what life is and will be are strongly shaped by experiences of our young adulthood.  My memories of 1968 are among my most vivid and intense.  I was nineteen years old, a college freshman who could not vote in a presidential election for another four years because the voting age at the time was 21. 

So many world-shaping, gut-wrenching events flooded the headlines and shaped our understanding of America and the world that year:  the Tet offensive in Vietnam; the My Lai massacre; Eugene McCarthy’s presidential run; Columbia University’s uprising; President Johnson’s decision not to run for a second full term; the assassination of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., followed by riots across the United States; the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy; the Chicago Democratic Convention riot; the first manned voyages of the Apollo space program; the Prague Spring; the French student uprising; the soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia; the massacre of protesting students in Mexico City; the black power salutes of Olympic athletes John Carlos and Tommie Smith (from Todd Gitlin commentary, “Remember year 1968 as a necessary good.” The Philadelphia Inquirer, Sunday, January 13, 2008, p. C7). 

Randy and I were married in 1968.

We were young and in love—filled with optimism and joy—while people whose values and leadership we most admired were being cut down by assassins, and institutions we relied on to frame the life on which we were just embarking were failing us.  So much violence, so much tragedy, so much passion.  Even now, 40 years later, the emotional rollercoaster that these memories evoke is dizzying and disorienting for me.

This year, 40 years later, these stark and important events will undoubtedly be chronicled in numerous documentaries.  But I believe, when taken together and judged over time, that it will be Martin Luther King, Jr.’s life, assassination and legacy that will be judged to have had the most profound impact on America for the generations that followed.  It will be the King legacy that permanently shaped a “necessary enlargement of democracy, freedom and moral seriousness” (Gitlin, 2008).

King generously and characteristically shared the credit for that impact with others.  Upon receiving the Nobel Peace Prize on December 10, 1964, he said:  “Every time I take a flight I am always mindful of the many people who make a successful journey possible, the known pilots and the unknown ground crew.  You honor the dedicated pilots of our struggle, who have sat at the controls as the freedom movement soared into orbit….  You honor the ground crew, without whose labor and sacrifice the jet flights to freedom could never have left the earth.  Most of these people will never make the headlines, and their names will never appear in Who’s Who.  Yet, when years have rolled past and when the blazing light of truth is focused on this marvelous age in which we live, men and women will know and children will be taught that we have a finer land, a better people, a more noble civilization because these humble children of God were willing to suffer for righteousness’ sake.” 

Today we honor, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.—“drum major for justice,” “drum major for peace,” “drum major for righteousness.”  We are responsible in our age to focus the “blazing light of truth” on that “marvelous age” as we live our lives and teach our children that “we have a finer land, a better people, a more noble civilization” because many brave Americans “were willing to suffer for righteousness’ sake.” 

We celebrate Dr. King with service in our communities.  I am so very proud to say that service to the community is an every day event at Temple University—not just an artifact of a Martin Luther King Day of Service.  Students, staff and faculty engage their energy, their expertise and their strength to make North Philadelphia a better place every day of the year.  I am honored to be a member of the Temple University family.

So let us remember today that we are indeed “bound together” in our responsibility to sustain the heritage and promote the values we commemorate today, along with the great man who was instrumental in shaping that heritage and stands as the embodiment of those values.  I am certain that Dr. King would want you to remember the hope you felt in 1968, even as you remember the grinding grief and horror.  Hope and sorrow soared side-by-side in the spirit of this incredible man, as he had, indeed, “been to the mountaintop.”  And we will follow in his footsteps.

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