Martin Luther King Jr.

There are measures of a man that we don't comprehend until the flood waters are rising past his neck. That is when we find out what lives within him. When you are cursed at, it requires no courage to curse back. When you are spit upon, it's no great feat to pucker up and spit in return.

How many of us, if faced with cruelty and injustice, would be able to keep a good enough soul to refuse violence and instead face evil with good? Martin Luther King Jr. was surrounded by evil. How do I define this particular evil? As the searing of the conscience that would allow one race to hold another in contempt simply because of the color of its skin.

King lived in a society where blacks couldn't drink from the same fountain as whites, couldn't sit in the front seats of a public bus, couldn't eat at a Woolworth's lunch counter, couldn't attend the same quality colleges as white students. A society where blacks weren't allowed to use the front entrance of some buildings, but rather had to slip in through the back door like servants. Where blacks couldn't live in the same neighborhood as whites, and black children weren't allowed to play with white children.

Those who broke these iron rules were threatened, beaten, jailed, burned out, bombed, murdered. The whites who committed these horrible crimes were acquitted by juries of their white peers. In the country ruled by "equal justice under law", there was no justice if you were black.

But even surrounded by such despicable evil, Martin Luther King Jr. refused to grow angry or bitter. He determined to fight evil not with more evil, but with goodness that outlined the ugliness of the hate swirling around him all the more clearly.

How can you not admire the strength and courage that allowed him to treat people with respect who treated him with none? When in his greatest speech, he dreamed of a day when ALL MEN would be judged "not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character", King unknowingly turned on a spotlight that shown first on himself, revealing his unalterable commitment to equal justice for ALL, and his unbreakable grip on the gospel of love.

Ever since that day, it is up to each individual, if we dare, to step into that bright spotlight and measure how tall our shadow stands next to his. Martin Luther King Jr's mark looms huge, forcing us to examine the content of our own character in comparison.

The life and work of Martin Luther King Jr. proves again that, as in all of history, the greatest men and women have been the humblest and kindest, and those who loom the largest in our minds have been those most acquainted with sacrificial love.