On Monday, we had a tremendous day of service in honor of the life and legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., feeding nearly 500 families with over 300 volunteers.  But, every MLK holiday, I can’t help but feel a bit of sadness.  Sadness that Dr. King’s life was cut so short.  Cut short before he could see his kids grow up.  Cut short before he could live a long life with his amazing wife, Coretta.  Cut short before he could finish the Dream that he started.  I was not yet born when Dr. King marched for jobs and freedom.  But, amidst all of the lionizing and rose-colored tributes, I am reminded that Dr. King was a human being.  A human being with a family, friends, and personal hopes and dreams of his own…family and friends who were left with a permanent hole in their hearts.

While being one of history’s most beloved figures today, Dr. King was not always loved in his day.  He was hated by many for his unwillingness to settle, even in the black community.  For his unwillingness to settle for half of equal rights, half of full human dignity, half of a more perfect union, half of a nonviolent movement.  He knew that America, despite its lofty ideals of freedom and the American Dream, was failing the descendants of slavery.  He also believed through nonviolent struggle, strategic agitation, and broad coalition building that America could change…and change America did.  Most of us today can’t imagine drinking at a water fountain that says ‘colored’ or giving up our seat on a public bus because of the color of our skin.  But, many of our elders living today experienced that reality for many, many years.  Some of them also struggled at Dr. King’s side and in the civil rights movement here in Prince George’s County.  We still have so much to learn from their stories.  It is because of their struggle and the movement for which Dr. King and so many others gave their lives, that people like me never had to use a segregated bathroom or be denied a home in a “whites only” community.

But Dr. King, a man, a husband, and a father, did not get the opportunity to see so many of the fruits of his labors.  He led a bus boycott at age 26, a march on Washington at age 34, and was assassinated at age 39.  Yet remembering Dr. King, the man, taken with so much of his life left to live, reminds us just how great his sacrifice really was.  Thank you, Dr. King.

-Mel Franklin

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