My mother was the strong wife, partner, and co-worker Martin Luther King, Jr. needed to be an effective leader, and he said so on many occasions.
Among her many accomplishments, my mother is often identified as the leader of the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday movement.
When your heart speaks to you about what you need to do to sustain life on this planet, listen to it, make a difference, and be an inspiration for generations to come. Be inspired by people like Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Christopher Reeve, Albert Schweitzer, Helen Keller, and many others.
The first African-American leader was Dr. Martin Luther King.
The NAACP was not a black-run, black-originated organization. It was run by 21 white, socialist, atheist, Marxist Democrats. It was the antithesis of Rev. Martin Luther King Sr.'s community at that time, which was capitalist, Christian, very pro-life, and pro-America.
It was the understanding of the power of perception that allowed the Martin Luther King, Jr. generations to stay true to the strategy of non-violence, refusing to retaliate when every emotional instinct would justify them doing so.
I grew up in the sixties watching B.B. King and Tito Puente and Miles Davis and Coltrane, everybody, Marvin Gaye, Jimi. And at the same time, with my left eye I was watching Dolores Huerta, Cesar Chavez, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Mother Teresa.
The library of my elementary school had this great biography section, and I read all of these paperback biographies until they were dog-eared. The story of Eleanor Roosevelt and Madame Curie and Martin Luther King and George Washington Carver and on and on and on.
Movies, TV, sports, come and go, but what you stand for is what people remember. Mandela, Martin Luther King, John Kennedy are people who really stood for something and were willing to die for it. You don't see a whole lot of that any more.
If the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s civil rights movement made demands that altered the course of American lives and backed up those demands with the willingness to give up your life in service of your civil rights, with Black Lives Matter, a more internalized change is being asked for: recognition.
