This 12 months’s Martin Luther King Jr. March can be particular. The most important MLK march within the nation can be in particular person for for the primary time for the reason that COVID-19 pandemic.
This 12 months, our metropolis, which held its first official MLK march in 1987 to honor the champion of justice and nonviolence, elevated its price range by $200,000 — a request from the San Antonio Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Fee’s govt board, which has labored to make the occasion extra sturdy, accessible and celebratory over time whereas sustaining its historic roots and dwelling mission.
The theme of this 12 months’s occasion, “Collectively We Will be the Dream,” echoes the King Heart’s theme, “Cultivating a Beloved Group Mindset to Remodel Unjust Programs.”
We hope you march — if not in particular person, then in spirit.
When: Monday at 10 a.m.
The place: Begins at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Academy, 3501 Martin Luther King Drive. Celebration at Pittman-Sullivan Park, 1101 Iowa St., will observe.
Getting there: Attendees are inspired to make use of VIA’s Park & Trip at Freeman Coliseum, 3201 E. Houston St. (Lot 1), or St. Philip’s School, 1801 Martin Luther King Drive (Lot 22 at Montana and Mittman streets)
On ExpressNews.com: ‘A name for voters’ rights’: San Antonio’s MLK Fee broadcasts theme for first march in 3 years
After the march kickoff at Martin Luther King Academy, after hundreds march the two.75 miles to Pittman-Sullivan Park, the place Specific-Information Editorial Board member Cary Clack would be the keynote speaker, the day by day work of placing King’s phrases into day by day motion will resume.
As Jessica M. Kemp, the communications chair for the San Antonio 2023 Martin Luther King Jr. Fee, instructed us throughout an Editorial Board assembly final week, the MLK march isn’t nearly celebrating King’s legacy or highlighting the necessity for unity and mutual respect on this given day, it’s additionally about difficult the neighborhood.
“Whenever you discuss racial reconciliation, once you discuss caring for the least of those, there’s work that needs to be achieved, as a result of little or no has modified,” she mentioned.
And San Antonio has work to do. We stay one of many poorest massive cities within the nation. We’re additionally probably the most economically segregated.
In his celebrated “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered Aug. 28, 1963, on the Lincoln Memorial as a part of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, King lamented {that a} century after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, “The Negro nonetheless will not be free. 100 years later, the lifetime of the Negro remains to be sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination.”
Progress has been made, however the ethical arc has usually bent slowly. And progress will not be assured. Division can take many kinds: political, racial, spiritual, financial. However bridges will be constructed via training, financial safety, service, and the resounding affirmation of equality and understanding.
King’s inspirational dream and work spanning the 13 years he led the trendy American civil rights motion are instructive. Earlier than he was assassinated on April 4, 1968, a lot of his focus was on financial justice. About two weeks earlier than King’s loss of life, within the ultimate march of his life, he known as for higher working circumstances for Black sanitation staff in Memphis, Tenn. Talking to a big crowd on the Mason Temple, King mentioned white residents of Memphis had been willfully detached to the struggling of town’s Black working poor.
Greater than 55 years after King’s assassination, a lot has modified in our nation, state and metropolis, and but can we truthfully say that King’s dream, so usually quoted on today, has been actually achieved? Can we are saying his full legacy is really honored or extensively understood?
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At King’s funeral, a tape recording was performed by which he spoke of how he wished to be remembered after his loss of life: “I’d like any person to say that day that Martin Luther King Jr. tried to present his life serving others.”
King’s work towards a “beloved neighborhood” transcended division, and his legacy transcends greater than sooner or later. After the march, embrace equality, social justice and progress with “the fierce urgency of now.”
