Governor Gregoire Addresses Seattle Community Colleges' 33rd Annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Celebration (As Written)

January 12, 2007

Each year around this time we celebrate the birth of Martin Luther King, Jr., who called on us to live up to the ideals that we claimed to value as Americans. He challenged us to look in the mirror and ask, �are we the nation we wish to be?�

I am reminded of the powerful and remarkably eloquent �Letter from a Birmingham Jail� he wrote to his fellow clergymen.

In that inspiring letter, which he began writing on the edges of a newspaper article, Dr. King challenged the clergy and indeed our entire nation to live up to the values that our nation was founded upon.

The letter abounds with wisdom and logic. It was a particularly direct challenge to those who saw what was happening in our country at the time, who knew of the racial discrimination and yet did nothing about it.

Let me read one passage from the letter: �Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.�

So many of his fellow clergymembers kept asking, �what�s the rush, why break laws, why push for rapid change. Change will come in time.� But Dr. King fired back, �justice too long delayed is justice denied.� Dr. King was impatient for justice and so should we all be.

Dr. King was truly the conscience of this nation in his short, yet deeply meaningful life. Graduating from high school at age 15, completing college only a few years later, earning his theology degree in his early twenties and becoming the president of the southern Christian Leadership Conference before he turned 30, and, of course, a Nobel Peace Prize winner at age 35.� he was a born leader. His death at age 39 was a tremendous loss to our nation and the entire world.

Fortunately, his memory lives on and inspires us all, not only each year around the anniversary of his birthday, but for anyone who has read his writings or listened to his speeches, throughout our lives.

As he closed his letter, Dr. King wrote, �If I have said anything in this letter that overstates the truth and indicates an unreasonable impatience, I beg you to forgive me. If I have said anything that understates the truth and indicates my having a patience that allows me to settle for anything less than brotherhood, I beg God to forgive me.

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