Martin Luther King Jr.
The 2025 Martin Luther King, Jr. Beloved Community Commemorative Service was held at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta today, Monday January 20, 2025. The 56th annual service began at 9 am EST (8 am CST) and was streamed online.
Reverend Natosha Reid Rice and Pastor Reginald W. Sharpe, Jr. presided over the service while Rev. Dr. Bernice A. King, The King Center CEO, (wiki) gave the Call to Commemoration
“As we commemorate King Holiday, let us recommit to the mission of protecting freedom, justice, and democracy for all. In the spirit of Kingian Nonviolence, we must continue to push for a world where every individual can live with dignity and respect. We must stand together against injustice, protect the rights of the marginalized, and strive to create a community at peace with itself. Let us honor the legacy of my father, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. by embracing nonviolence as a way of life and working tirelessly to build a brighter future for all humanity.” ---Dr. Bernice A. King, January 2025.
The Keynote Speaker was Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, social activist, professor in the Practice of Public Theology and Public Policy at Yale Divinity School and co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for a Moral Revival.
In response to those who lightly say they love the words of Dr. King, speaker Mayor Andre Dickens of Atlanta, recalled his own pastor's admonition "Love must look like something."
To honor Dr. King today, we share here the still stinging observations on race in America, as delivered in his March 25, 1965 speech at the steps of the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery, Alabama following March from Selma,
"Toward the end of the Reconstruction era, something very significant happened. That is what was known as the Populist Movement. The leaders of this movement began awakening the poor white masses and the former Negro slaves to the fact that they were being fleeced by the emerging Bourbon interests.
Not only that, but they began uniting the Negro and white masses into a voting bloc that threatened to drive the Bourbon interests from the command posts of political power in the South.
To meet this threat, the southern aristocracy began immediately to engineer this development of a segregated society. I want you to follow me through here because this is very important to see the roots of racism and the denial of the right to vote.
Through their control of mass media, they revised the doctrine of white supremacy. They saturated the thinking of the poor white masses with it, thus clouding their minds to the real issue involved in the Populist Movement.
They then directed the placement on the books of the South of laws that made it a crime for Negroes and whites to come together as equals at any level. And that did it. That crippled and eventually destroyed the Populist Movement of the nineteenth century.
If it may be said of the slavery era that the white man took the world and gave the Negro Jesus, then it may be said of the Reconstruction era that the southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow.
He gave him Jim Crow. And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man.
And he ate Jim Crow. And when his undernourished children cried out for the necessities that his low wages could not provide, he showed them the Jim Crow signs on the buses and in the stores, on the streets and in the public buildings. And his children, too, learned to feed upon Jim Crow … “
- Dr. Martin Luther King, 1965, in speech given in Montgomery Ala, as archived at the King Institute at Stanford and also reprinted at speakola.com. Full speech on youtube linked above; the quoted passage begins at time 11:08.)
Cover photo of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr found at wikimedia commons, original from nobel foundation, sweden, 1964 (public domain).