And then there's Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, this coming Monday, which is both a celebration of the man's life but also a call to work even harder for the goals he wanted for all of us.
The Norwich Branch of the NAACP and Norwich Free Academy hosts a celebratory luncheon whose theme is "Restoring the Soul of the Nation," this Friday in the Sidney Frank Center Ensemble Room, which again this year will honor outstanding achievers from across our state and community. Tickets may still be available and you should visit the website, to get yours.
Dr. King, born the same year as Anne Frank, would have turned 90, yesterday, his actual birthday, had James Earl Ray not assassinated him almost fifty-one years ago in Memphis.
The murders of American icons, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Dr. King, and Bobby Kennedy, all occurred in The Sixties. I was alive for all three and I hope you'll believe me when I tell you we are a better nation today, if not always better people because they lived.
I think of the three, King's impact and influence are still most felt in more ways and aspects of our lives as US citizens than perhaps he, himself, might have ever imagined.
I was a high school sophomore, a pimply too-loud white preppie kid, wandering around our nation's capital, Washington D. C., on a school trip my father organized that ended up right through the middle of Resurrection City, at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, just weeks after Dr. King's assassination.
I was stunned at the scale and scope of the settlement, the audacity and eloquence of the vision that propelled and compelled it into existence and the pervasiveness of the poverty and despair that made it inevitable and necessary. Reinventing American society so that the reasons why it had to be done would become history and aren't a part of our present or future, is a small, but important, piece of Dr. King's legacy.
Monday, on the actual King Day holiday, across the country there will be ceremonies and commemorations. Ours in Norwich at City Hall starts at quarter past one in the afternoon in the David Ruggles Freedom Courtyard with some speeching, a little preaching (I think we can put it to good use), as well as singing followed by a march to Evans Memorial African Methodist Episcopal Church for some warm words on what has been to my memory historically a typical New England winter's day and then we'll all go home, back to the lives we lead and the people we are.
I would hope this year across this country we use however we choose to celebrate the dream of Dr. King, in a manner that makes it our own. And then, each in our own way and time we use that dream as he did as a fulcrum, to change the world. Again.
-bill kenny
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