Monday, January 20, 2014

The King Legacy

     Today we honor and remember the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., not only a champion of civil rights for blacks, but truly a great American who believed utmost in the Christian ideals, breathed to life by the birth of Jesus Christ and formed into a nation by our Founding Fathers. It was his belief in the sacred principles and values outlined in the founding documents of this country, and his mission to awaken the conscience of a nation to live those precepts more fully and completely, that distinguished him from so many "civil rights" leaders since.
      Martin Luther King Jr. began life as Michael King in 1929. His father, who was a minister, attended a Baptist conference in Nazi Germany in 1934. During that conference he was so inspired by the life and mission of the great German 16th century reformer, Martin Luther, that upon his return home he legally changed both his and his young son's name to Martin Luther King.
     Martin Luther King Jr., like Martin Luther King Sr., was a deeply spiritual man and was dedicated to non-violent change. In 1955, while attending a meeting at his local church, word came that his house had been fire bombed. He rushed home, concerned at first with the safety of his wife and small child, but after finding them safe, his concerns turned to the angry mob outside his home wanting vengeance. The potentially explosive situation that may have occurred between the partially armed mob and police was subdued when the Reverend King calmly walked out onto his front porch and silenced the crowd with his mere presence. He told them that violence would only hurt their cause and that they should follow the advice of the bible to meet hate with love. He told them to go home and put down their weapons, and they did. Such was the power to heal that the Reverend King possessed, not only for an angry mob, but a nation that had forgotten the better angels of its nature.
     A deliberate attempt by the media and others on the Left to diminish Reverend King's dedication to God, first and foremost, has taken place over the last few decades by their insistence on calling him Doctor King to the exclusion of calling him Reverend King.  Reverend King's ideal society where a man is judged, "not by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character," has been turned on its head by modern "civil rights" leaders like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, whose aim it is to give special privilege based on skin color. And while the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. organized marches and boycotts to achieve justice for all men, I would not sully his name and memory by calling him a community organizer, that term having been so bastardized and corrupted by men like Saul Alinsky and Barack Obama.
     In this time when we must once again fight for true liberty and justice as Reverend King did almost 60 years ago, we would be heartened and wise to remember the reverend's message of non-violence and the eventual justice it can bring. In one of his famous speeches entitled How Long? Not Long. The Reverend King said, "the arc of the Universe is long, but it bends towards justice." We must always remember that the legacy of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was one of fidelity to God and his justice, which applies to all men regardless of skin color.
    

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