Staying Awake through a Great Revolution
2014 MLK Breakfast Focuses on King’s Words
In June of 1965, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. addressed the students and faculty at Oberlin College. He titled his commencement address “Remaining Awake through a Great Revolution,” to underscore the need for staying vigilant “to achieve the proper mental attitudes and responses that the new situation demands.”
In his address, Dr. King urged the graduates “to achieve a world perspective,” because “all life is interrelated, and we are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.” He also exhorted them to work “passionately and unrelentingly to get rid of racial injustice” and in support of economic justice, and to “get rid of violence, hatred, and war.”
Nearly five decades later, these goals confront new assaults. Recent legislative initiatives in North Carolina and other states suggest an agenda that would revive some of the restrictions on voting that long plagued the South. Protests organized against those laws by the state NAACP have drawn national attention—and serve to renew Dr. King’s admonition to “remain awake” to these changes that threaten the “Great Revolution” for which Dr. King lived and died.
Challenging this “new Jim Crow” era requires both publicizing what is happening here and in legislatures across the country, and fighting to overturn the new, restrictive laws, whether through remedial legislation or in the courts. And the work of public defenders such as Mr. Williams faces ever tougher challenges: in addition to tightening voting rules, the NC legislature has repealed laws that, for a few years after enactment, allowed prisoners to appeal their convictions or sentences on the basis of racial bias or even demonstrable innocence—and that freed a number of wrongfully convicted men, one after fourteen years on death row.
The MLK Prayer Breakfast will be held at 8:30 a.m. Sat., January 18, 2014 at the Grand Ballroom of the Omni Grove Park Inn.
