Photo by Pat Christman
Yolanda King, daughter of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., spoke at Minnesota State University Tuesday night. King said there was still much work to be done to achieve her father's dream of a society that celebrates diversity.
Speaking to a crowd of hundreds packed into the Centennial Student Union Ballroom, Yolanda King noted that most of her audience was born decades after the most intense years of the civil rights movement.
"For some of you, it seems like ancient history," King joked during her lecture at Minnesota State University Tuesday night. But nearly 40 years after the assassination of her father, Martin Luther King Jr., she said we are still challenged to realize the civil rights leader's dream of peace and equality.
"We as a nation, we as humanity, have not reached the Promised Land," she said.
It was what her father called "the beloved community," a multicultural society built on peaceful coexistence. To achieve that dream, she said, each person must use "the last of our human freedoms" — the power to choose. King said that meant choosing to be open instead of biased, to uplift instead of hurt and to embrace diversity.
"We must celebrate those differences until difference doesn't make a difference in how we treat each other," she said.
It was not so long ago, she said, that black children were set on by police dogs and knocked down with water hoses when they marched in the streets of Birmingham, Ala. To a younger generation, King said, that time must "seem like misty images out of a horror story."
"But it was not a mirage." King said she had just passed through "one of the most difficult times" of her life, following the death of her mother, Coretta Scott King, in January. But she said she also found a surprising inner peace, and a renewed energy to fight for equality.
That effort is currently focused on the educational system. She said the narrative of American history taught in schools must begin with the American Indians who arrived long before Columbus, and include the many peoples of different nations who came together to build the country.
"Our objective must be to teach and tell that story as if everyone mattered," King said. "And indeed they do."
Near the end of her lecture, King quoted not her father, but another man who died trying to achieve peace: Mahatma Gandhi.
"You must be the change you want to see in the world," she said.
Email this article | Permanent link | Topstories news | Topstories news archives
Minnesota State
University, Mankato
Mankato, MN 56001
1-800-722-0544
© 2005-2013 Minnesota State University, Mankato. Minnesota State University, Mankato is a member of
Minnesota State Colleges & Universities system and an affirmative action/equal opportunity university.
