For the past twenty-something years, I have spent every January 15th singing, humming or dancing to the tune of Stevie Wonder's 'Happy Birthday.'
It was a cold January evening about 20 years ago, when I saw Steve Wonder in concert at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. He performed 'Happy Birthday' as his last song and asked the audience to honor the legacy of Dr. King by continuing to sing as we exited the hall.
As the crowd walked slowly through the hallways towards the main exit, you could hear them sing in unison: 'Haappyyy birthdaaay, happy birthday, happy birthday.' I could barely sing. I merely watched as others were transformed by the power of a song. Some shed a few tears and others embraced while singing. New Yorkers and tourists alike gathered to see a show and emerged as brothers and sisters bonded by the memory of Dr. King.
Happy birthday to you, Dr. King!
Anna --
How do I love Steve Wonder -- let me count the ways? That song was on his "Songs in the Key of Life" album. But I digress.
You may have seen the below quote many times, but just in case, I wanted to share it with you, for it moves me every time I read it. It is an excerpt from a letter that Dr. King, Jr., wrote from The Birmingham Jail:
We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we stiff creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging dark of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross-county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you no forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness" then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.
http://www.nobelprizes.com/nobel/peace/MLK-jail.html
Posted by: Whitney Johnson | January 15, 2007 at 08:44 AM