Today we honor the man who was integral to the fight for civil rights in our nation: Martin Luther King Jr. MLK Jr. is my national hero for the last century. Read what he said in 1967 to get a glimpse of why.
Now the first thing that we must do is to develop within ourselves a deep sense of somebodiness. Don’t let anybody make you feel that you are nobody. Because the minute one feels that way, he is incapable of rising to his full maturity as a person. You know a lot of people have segregated minds and one of the first things that the Negro must do is to desegregate his mind.
I had parents who taught me from the very beginning that I was somebody, and that I should never feel inferior. They taught all of us that, that we should feel that we are as good as any other children. And I remember day after day getting on that bus -- it was a segregated bus. Negroes had to sit in the back. And often we had to stand over empty seats because the seats up at the front were reserved for whites only.
And I started getting on that bus going across town and every time I got on the bus, even though I found myself having to take my body back to the back of the bus, I always left my mind on the front seat. And I said to myself one of these days, I’m going to put my body up there where my mind is.
And so I say, let us keep moving, let us move on toward the goal of brotherhood, toward the goal of personal fulfillment, toward the goal of a society undergirded by justice.
Preventing God given rights to some diminishes and harms all of us, irrespective of color. Today, let us honor the man who did so much to awaken our nation to that truth - and for helping us to move "toward the goal of a society undergirded by justice."
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