Just another day in Kid land. There I was on the floor in my imaginary land of play. Toys turned into real people, animals, robots, among others. My world followed, shadowed, and imitated the one the adult selected as the real one. My world was like a scene from the 2022 movie Everything Everywhere All at Once.

On this particular morning, I began to hear something on the radio, feverishly interjecting between the smooth jazz and R&B hits that often served as backdrop to my creative floor play theater. In these interjections of voices that I now identify as news headlines, there was a methodically repeated line. “King Was Right.” I heard it over and over again. “King Was Right” was the subtext that laid the foundation that my preschool mind could surmise. Now, add in the general African American axis, of which my family’s life revolved, and I assembled the Everything Everywhere All at Once concept and applied it to what my attuned receptors were piecing together.

Eurika! My mind connected the dots. There was a black King in America, and his name was Martin Luther. And he was right about everything. This black King had a powerful voice like Thunder and led marches across the country, leading thousands of people. This King did so in a way that would forever change our nation.

As my tiny legs grew longer and my mind grew wiser. That voice only echoed like sleep-deprived rumblings of a stomach after an indulgence in greasy food from an evening that went a little too late. He was gone. But why, my inquisitive emerging mind would ask. What was it about this King that he was not allowed to see his children off to college, experience the silvering of his and his beautiful wife’s hair, and grow old together? Was it that he spoke the truth about America beyond the Leave it to Beaver Norman Rockwell fantasy of land with a perfect fairytale past? In the pre-social media days of King’s life, there was the radio and television, which featured only one hour of national news at 6:30 PM, yet Dr. King was so impactful that his message traveled through the annals of history like that of Mahatma Gandhi and Christ himself. Each never traveled that far from their home regions, but their voices carried around the world. In adulthood, I came to understand the legacy and its impact on my life more with each passing year.

Waking up in my suburban home would have been nothing more than an ever-exhausting, endless dream without the Fair Housing Act of 1968. My 33-plus years in the Fire Service would not have been possible except for Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin.

But more than any other factor. The most pronounced influence of Dr. King was his speeches, which were glorious in revealing the strategies that moved people to action. It was this kind of ministry and service of fighting the great evils of divisiveness, bias, and racism woven into our society that, from the days of my youth, I have been all too familiar with. Such as:

The Three Evils of Society (Aug. 31, 1967 — Chicago), and of I’ve Been to the Mountaintop!  (April 3, 1968 — Memphis, Tenn.) All acknowledged King was indeed right and therefore had the corresponding balance of politics and history to bear witness to his prophetic wisdom.

Yes, King was right in a less well-known quote in his sermon notes, which were never completed due to his assassination. What challenged my intellect most was an introspective self-assessment, along with global-stage implications. This quote says

“The major problem of life is learning how to handle the costly interruptions – the door that slams shut, the plan that got sidetracked, the marriage that failed, or that lovely poem that didn’t get written because someone knocked on the door.” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

This quote stood alone in my soul as a guiding light for when plans are interrupted. Friends’ plans are sidetracked; what exists deep within turns tragedy into triumph and social and spiritual malaise (dissatisfaction, nausea, or dysfunction of a society, including political and spiritual leaders, from the source of which is unknown and not easily discerned) into mountain-top experiences of victory.

That lands us squarely in the lap of 2025 and another one of those crucible times where the interruption, slammed doors, rolling back of landmark Supreme Court cases, voting rights caricatured and fractured by racialized political gerrymandering.

If not for the faithful words of Dr. King in his I Have a Dream speech. He said I may not get there with you (to the promise land.) Yet he showed us the formula to ultimately pressing forward. That formula is what drives the hopes and dreams of so many. In the face of a Biblically Pauline experience in the 20th century, he pressed on and never looked back. Lament was not reserved for those in the struggle. Melancholy drifts into insobrieties of conscience and meanderings of self-pity, where it is not a luxury to be afforded.

2020 happened and it is now 2025 in the land of the backlash we must remember the words of Martin Luther King Jr. who was right when he said “If you can’t fly, run. If you can’t run, walk. If you can’t walk, crawl. But by all means, keep moving,” and his definition of hope as the final refusal to give up in the face of despair.” Google search AI overview.