The “Martin Luther King, Jr. Day of Service” logo on t-shirts issued to volunteers.

Yesterday I received an e-mail from the Obama presidential campaign:

…In your neighborhood and in thousands of communities across the country, Americans are answering President-elect Obama’s call to service.

Tomorrow, January 19th, our nation will come together in a shared spirit of community. And I wanted to make sure you know how to participate.

Monday is not only the eve of an inauguration that brings all of us so much hope, it’s also Martin Luther King Jr. Day — when we recognize the power of one man to bring about change by serving his country.

Help kick off an ongoing commitment to serve our communities by taking part in this extraordinary day of service….

I went to the web site and found an event in my locale. The marshaling area for the volunteers was on the university campus – this early in the morning on a day off from school.

Over fifty students showed up for the early morning orientation and subsequent assignment into volunteer groups to work all day at tasks for a number of local non-profit community groups.

The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day of Service is an annual volunteer activity which has begun to take off:

…In 1994 Congress passed the King Holiday and Service Act, designating the King Holiday as a national day of volunteer service. Instead of a day off from work or school, Congress asked Americans of all backgrounds and ages to celebrate Dr. King’s legacy by turning community concerns into citizen action. The King Day of Service brings together people who might not ordinarily meet, breaks down barriers that have divided us in the past, leads to better understanding and ongoing relationships, and is an opportunity to recruit new volunteers for your ongoing work.

Participation in the King Day of Service has grown steadily over the past decade, with hundreds of thousands of Americans each year engaging in projects such as tutoring and mentoring children, painting schools and senior centers, delivering meals, building homes, and reflecting on Dr. King’s life and teachings. Many of the projects started on King Day continue to engage volunteers beyond the holiday and impact the community year-round.

Although the scope of the event grows every year, many people still are not aware of the service component of the holiday. By encouraging the participation of as many organizations as possible, we hope to make next year’s King Day of Service the biggest and best ever, engaging more people in service that honors Dr. King’s life and teachings…

Student volunteers signing in early in the morning.

From the local volunteer organizers:

…Tiffany Bumpers, a UCM Americorps volunteer, is coordinating the “A Day On, Not a Day Off” day of service on Jan. 19, 2009. The goal of this day is to give the community something they can’t get off a shelf, carrying Dr. King’s message that “everybody can be great because everybody can serve.” Bumpers and her team of volunteers and group leaders hope to leave a lasting impact on the community…

…”The purpose of this day is to give back to the people of Warrensburg,” Bumpers said. “The day of service has been a success in many other cities such as Philadelphia and Washington D.C., and we want it to be a success here too…”

A volunteer team gets their bearings before leaving for their assignment.

Here’s Martin Luther King, Jr’s famous “I Have A Dream” speech in full on YouTube:

When I was a child, my uncle asked me to find the full text of this speech and copy it for him, as he had recently joined the Toastmasters and wanted copies of famous speeches. I was only a kid without walkable access to the library, so I did what I could: I copied the excerpt that everybody is familiar with out of the “Martin Luther King, Jr.” entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica (we had a six year old set at the time), and typed it up on the screen of our Commodore 64. Twenty five years later, I can watch the full speech any time I have access to a computer, which is 90% of my day.

Forty-six years after Martin Luther King, Jr made that historic address at the Lincoln Memorial, back when it was still legal to bar a white woman from marrying a black man and de facto legal to stop black people from voting, we’ve elected a black man to be our president, with unprecented popularity and support for a president-elect. At the same time, on the YouTube page of King’s speech, comments had to be turned off because of all the hateful racist slurs directed against him, one of the most intelligent and gifted orators in our history. We still have a long way to go.

My hope is that the changes in my experience, from growing up without direct access to information to having it at my fingertips, will continue to help us along in the path toward King’s dream. It might be hoping too much, but then again, even a year ago prominent voices told me that Obama could not be elected president because of his race. It’s human to hope, and I’m not giving that up.

(“Broken Obelisk” at the Rothko Chapel in Houston, TX)

On this official holiday commemorating the birth and life of Martin Luther King, Jr. (his birthday was actually last Tuesday), it’s worthwhile to look at how far we have come since he was taken from us almost 40 years ago.

I was born in Louisiana, where most of my family still lives. My mother’s father is approximately the same age as Dr. King would have been. He still tells me tales transmitted to him from his elders that grew up in the direct aftermath of the Civil War, tales of the War of Northern Aggression, tales of a noble South kept down by its jealous brother to the north, tales of an African population well kept by their masters (because it was only in slaveholders’ interest to give the greatest care to their property.) Even though he still holds the same views as he did growing up in the segregated South, in his lifetime, we’ve seen not only the legal barriers lifted from former slaves to the same rights as their former masters, we’ve seen a changing of attitudes.  

For example, in 1958, only 4% of Americans approved of marriage between whites and blacks, while 94% disapproved. By 1968, the year of King’s assassination, that split was 20-73. By 1983, it was 43-5, and now the number is 79-15. When the Supreme Court recently restricted using race as a factor in assigning schools in a case of voluntary integration by an elected school board, a majority of Americans disapproved.

Attitudes on Dr. King himself have changed, too. As Rick Perlstein notes, at the time of his assassination, conservative figures as prominent as Ronald Reagan (then governor of California) essentially blamed King’s violent death on his own doctrine of civil disobedience: “the great tragedy that began when we began compromising with law and order, and people started choosing which laws they’d break.” Holy dogwhistle, Batman! 15 years later, Reagan, pressured by congressional Democrats, signed the bill making MLK Day a federal holiday. Now conservatives regularly invoke King as a great man, even calling him a conservative!

What we need to remember is that even though we have come so far, we still have a long way to go, as any one who has paid attention to the Sherman George situation in St. Louis can tell you. In America as in Missouri, people of color are more likely to live in poverty, live without health care, and die at a younger age. African Americans have an average of about $6000 in assets, while the average white family has about $80,000. We’re still a ways from realizing Martin Luther King’s dream, and as we commemorate Dr. King’s legacy, we should remember that he struggled immensely along with millions of others to get what he got, and that struggle has got to continue.

(Inscription on MLK Statue in Fountain Park, St. Louis. Photo courtesy of Flickr User I Love North St. Louis )