Here is a speech I wrote in June. I have been looking for it over the past few weeks and finally found it two nights ago. Then I had to convert it so that I could post it here. I tweaked the second paragraph to reflect President Elect Obama's historic victory, but the rest remains unchanged.
It's long, but worth the read, especially now. Many of the same things addressed in this speech are issues we're dealing with today. That, and Obama's win is what makes the words in this speech still very relevant today.
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Shortly before his assassination on June 5, 1968 Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy made the following prediction during an interview on Meet the Press: "Things are moving so fast in race relations (in this country) a Negro could be president in 40 years. There’s no question about it," Kennedy continued. "In the next 40 years a Negro can achieve the same position that my brother has."
Today, exactly 40 years later, Barack Obama is the President Elect of the United States of America. President Obama will soon take the same job Robert Kennedy’s brother held and Robert himself might have held had he not been assassinated 90 days into his presidential campaign. Many will venture to tell you that Obama is also the fruit of Martin Luther King’s dream, a dream deferred until now, exactly when Kennedy said it would happen.
Obama often quotes King when talking about why he’s running for president. He calls it the "fierce urgency of now," which comes from a speech King delivered to members of the clergy on his objections to the war in Vietnam.
"We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today," King said to his audience of mostly ministers on April 7, 1967, nearly a year before his death. "We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity."
Whether the realization of King’s dream, or a manifestation of Kennedy’s prediction, Barack Obama’s ascent to the highest office in the land isn’t the only manner in which the lives of these two men parallel one another.
I want to share a few other ways in which King and Kennedy were very much alike: First, both men were staunch advocates for eradicating poverty and racial divisions in this country, and they spent their lives pushing this country to live up to its promises as spelled out by the founders in the U.S. Constitution.
King hoped that one day men and women would be judged by the content of their character and not by their skin color. Similarly, Kennedy worked to end discrimination while also acknowledging that prejudice would continue to be one of America’s greatest challenges. "...we have tried to make progress and we are making progress," Kennedy once said. "We are not going to accept the status quo."
Second, both King and Kennedy were against the war in Vietnam and desperately wanted it to end.
Kennedy actually made opposition to the conflict part of his presidential campaign platform. "Our brave young men are dying in the swamps of Southeast Asia," Kennedy said in a speech he delivered in California on March 24, 1968. "Which of them might have written a poem? Which of them might have cured cancer? Which of them might have played in a World Series or given us the gift of laughter from the stage or helped build a bridge or a university? Which of them would have taught a child to read? It is our responsibility to let these men live... It is indecent if they die because of the empty vanity of their country."
Third, both men were change agents who forever left their mark on this nation. King was a Southern Baptist pastor with a pulpit who galvanized a generation to collectively work to change a system from one of oppression to one of opportunity, for all people, not just blacks. He believed that "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
Kennedy’s presidential campaign was all about change, especially after his brother was assassinated in 1963. Kennedy experienced another epiphany during a 1966 tour of South Africa, where he witnessed the effects of apartheid first-hand.
In an interview with Look magazine, he said: "At the University of Natal in Durban, I was told the church to which most of the white population belongs teaches apartheid as a moral necessity. A questioner declared that few churches allow black Africans to pray with the white because the Bible says that is the way it should be, because God created Negroes to serve," Kennedy recalled.
"But suppose God is black," Kennedy replied during his visit to the university. "What if we go to Heaven and we, all our lives, have treated the Negro as an inferior, and God is there, and we look up and He is not white? What then is our response?"
Kennedy remembered there was no answer to his question. Only silence.
Both King and Kennedy spoke out against apartheid, and both became the hope of South Africans.
It wasn’t until 1990 that South Africa began to slowly dismantle its apartheid system. In 1992 a whites-only referendum approved the reform process, and on April 27, 1994, the first democratic elections were held there, with people of all races being able to vote.
Indeed, these two men were unmistakable instruments of change. One only has to read what’s inscribed on Kennedy’s gravestone at Arlington National Cemetery. The quote is taken from a speech he gave at the University of Cape Town, South Africa: "Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope..."
Most importantly, however, is the fact that both King and Kennedy had the uncanny ability to connect with ordinary people.
Each built coalitions of unlikely allies. For King it was urban minorities and Jewish civil rights workers who put their lives on the line so that African Americans could vote. Kennedy built upon this coalition, adding Hispanic farm workers and impoverished whites who four years earlier had supported segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace. "This coalition of have-nots," wrote journalist Jeremy Sherer in the Daily Californian, had conflicts and prejudices within its own ranks; however, what held them together was the belief that Robert Kennedy truly did feel their pain and that he was going to do something about it."
The same can be said about Rev. King.
The 1968 assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4 and of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy on June 5, did not stop people from making change happen.
The 1960s were a time of chaos. Riots were erupting in inner-cities across this country, adding to widespread consternation about where we were going as a country. We were experiencing what many historians call, a crisis of conscience. Conflict raged between seemingly every part of our society- whites versus non-whites, young versus old, the economically privileged versus those who were barred from fully realizing their full potential.
From that emerged two men who were so different, but yet the same. And America was changed forever because both King and Kennedy dared to dream, to hope, to offer the possibility of improving the lives of others, to strike out against injustice, to send forth a tiny ripple of hope.
They alone had the audacity of hope.
On their shoulders Obama now stands. And now he too dares to hope.
And so should we.
UPDATE: It's official. Police are charging Ashley Todd with filing a false police report.
