Martin Luther King Jr — hope for justice resonates across time
Commentary by Sarah Haug | FāVS News
“The light of men is justice. Quench it not with the contrary winds of oppression and tyranny. The purpose of justice is the appearance of unity among men.”
Baha’u’llah
I’ve been thinking this month about the way Martin Luther King Jr. brought a hope for justice to people of all walks of life — and found that hope in the unlikeliest of places.
In 2016, NBC aired a show called, “Timeless,” involving time travel to places in America’s past. In the show, the pilot of the time machine, who is also one of the chief scientists on the project, is a Black man from the west side of Chicago. In the first episode he says to his boss, who is also Black (from the UK), that he shouldn’t ever go back in time because, “There is literally no place in American history that will be awesome for me.”
He goes anyway, and we see in the subsequent episodes exactly what he’s talking about: in the way he isn’t allowed entrance to a bar in 1937 New Jersey; when he lifts up a little girl so she can take a drink from a water fountain labeled “colored” in 1934 Arkansas; in the number of times he’s called “boy.”
I was born in Washington, D.C., in July of 1968, a few months after King was assassinated and a few weeks after Bobby Kennedy was shot. The Vietnam War was ramping up, and in that moment, a lot of people, my parents among them, felt as if all the good that had been done and everything that had been accomplished, in great part because of the work of King, would disappear. In those first days and months, they lost their hope for change. Or for justice.
Sometimes the world really does seem hopeless, and justice appears to be something we can never achieve. But time tells us change is possible, and it comes about when individual people make everyday choices — to quote again from “Timeless” — “some small, some stupid, some monumental.” As long as we keep working for change — and justice — we have a pathway forward.
King said, “We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.”
He had a vision of the future, which he put into words in many different ways, in many different speeches, but one of my favorites goes, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”
