Good Morning. I am truly honored to be your speaker for this wonderful gathering dedicated each year to celebrating the life of Dr. Martin Luther King.

I promise not to speak long; it is a long program. You also asked me not to speak too long, and I won’t, but I also will not demean this occasion by giving you a micro-waved, fictionalized, sound-bite version of his life that has become so prevalent recently. It is an injustice to the life of Martin Luther King.

Especially in times like these, we need to spend some time really delving into who Martin Luther King was, for in that delving we might discover some principles by which we can move through the difficulties we face today. Now the risk we take is that, as we engage ourselves with the real Martin Luther King, some of us may find that we have been celebrating the wrong man. We all may find that we cannot handle the real Martin Luther King. He may disturb our comfort more than we bargained for, but in that process we may grow into the kinds of human beings our times demand.

I have been disturbed for a number of years by the proliferation of literature, speeches and children’s plays in which the lines from the “I Have a Dream” speech are quoted—often out of context. Of all the speeches and writing done by Dr. King, I wonder why our nation has chosen that speech to exemplify the work and life of Martin Luther King I suspect there is something harmless in a dreamer. Someone who is dreaming while asleep or daydreaming while awake is relatively powerless and easily relegated to a status of unimportance—symbolic without substance. It suggests a person not engaged in life’s struggles and trials and challenges. The life of Martin Luther King could not be further than that description. Dr. King was much more than a dreamer. In the few short years that he lived, he engaged life fully, courageously, prophetically, and sacrificially and we are the benefactors of that life.

Just what is the spirit and the soul of the man? And we must keep in mind that he was just a man—a man with the fears, and faults and foibles that characterize all human beings—not perfect, but one given over to a commitment that was extraordinary, amazing, and worth remembering. In many ways we stand on the shoulders of this man, who unleashed the struggle for human dignity in his time in a way that people all over the world have caught and acted upon.

Our first insights about Martin Luther King come from his childhood. Martin Luther King did not know poverty. He grew up in a comfortable home, but close enough to poverty to see contrasts and disparities between the lives of some and the lives of others. He heard consistently from his father a commentary on the conditions that subjected an entire group of people whose economic, political, and social standing was determined by the color of their skin. He experienced the indignities perpetrated against people who looked like him as he traveled alongside of his father. It led him to ask, “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?” referring to conditions which he would later describe in the Letter from Birmingham Jail. He described the “nagging signs reading ‘white’ and ‘colored’; when your first name becomes ‘nigger’ and your middle name becomes ‘boy’ (however old you are), and your last name becomes ‘John,’ and your wife and mother are never given the respected title ‘Mrs.’… when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of nobodiness….” These conditions troubled young Martin.

But, in contrast, on Sunday mornings he also heard a message from the pulpit that declared God’s love for all human beings. He heard of a loving benevolent God who appropriated His love on all people without respect to color or status. This conflict between what he heard was God’s commentary on people and the commentary of a racist segregationist South stirred early in the heart of a young Martin Luther King and began to take the form of a strong conviction that would challenge the Southern Jim Crow segregationist system. In the meantime young Martin was studying hard, listening well, and forming the “big” words (as he called them) that he would need to articulate some very big ideals. The soul and spirit of Martin Luther King was shaped by a biblical description of a God who loved everyone and a biblical mandate for those who had privilege to do something about the plight of the hungry, the homeless, and the naked. These experiences formed in him a sense of a universe governed by moral law that bent toward justice and was shaped by love.

His later studies carried him to a deeper and deeper understanding of this moral law and his conviction grew that those who stood by and watched evil unfold without doing anything to stop it were just as guilty of wrong as those who perpetrated the deed.

“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy. The true neighbor will risk his position, his prestige, and even his life for the welfare of others. In the valleys and hazardous pathways, he will lift some bruised and beaten brother to a higher and more noble life.”

This is the heart and soul of the man we celebrate today.

This early influence in Martin Luther King was matched by another compelling one. He took more seriously and believed more deeply than even the writers of the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, among them, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” In Martin’s young mind and heart a marriage had formed between the belief that God is a God of love whose love extends to everyone and the words that all men are created equal and are entitled to life liberty and pursuit of happiness. This was a dangerous potent for a nation still steeped in segregation, oppression, and economic deprivation.

Martin’s work began in the South where he saw blatant violations to principles he had been taught to hold sacred. And joining with others equally courageous as he, created a movement so morally driven that it shamed a nation into change. Scenes where water hoses and police dogs were turned on men, women and children peacefully marching for freedom and dignity revealed an ugly sore in America that must be purged. But still grounded in an abiding belief that Negroes, Black people, African Americans weren’t really their equals, most people wanted King to act duly grateful for the concessions that had been given and go back to Montgomery and back to preaching and minding his business. He had no place, they believed, in international affairs. After all he was just a Negro. The world wasn’t ready for where Martin would go next because the world did not understand the principles that had shaped the heart and soul of the man.

The world did not understand that Martin wasn’t driven only by the injustices he saw against one group of people whose racial and ethnic identity he shared. Martin’s deep conviction about what he believed to be God’s commentary on humankind and his growing awareness of other people in America and other places in the world where oppression and poverty ruled led him beyond Montgomery or even Atlanta. He began to plan the Poor People’s March on Washington to be joined by poor Whites, Native Americans, and underpaid farm workers. He spoke out against the Viet Nam War for its effects on the lives of not only Americans, but the Viet Namese as well. He noted the disparity in who was represented on the front lines and coming home in body bags. His declaration of the wrongs he saw earned him the label of “Communist” in an effort to portray him as an enemy of America who was really the friend of America, seeking to redeem the soul of America.

Martin spoke against imperialism in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. He spoke against heavy investments in militarism while poverty ran rampant in throughout the world. These deeds earned him the anger and criticism of many, including African Americans who thought the struggle was only about blacks and whites. Yet, years after his death, he has been found to be right on many of these issues—not because Martin was some kind of seer, but because the principles by which he made these declarations were right. All men and women are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. Everyone is entitled to life, and liberty and pursuit of happiness. And no human being has the moral authority to deny those rights to any other human being.

Those of us who are old enough to remember, recall that Martin’s words and work did not garner the same admiration and reverence then that the mythologized dreaming Martin garners today. Which Martin do we celebrate?

I, frankly, want little to do with the dreamer the media have conjured up for our remembrances of Martin Luther King, but I do embrace the Martin who did not restrict his love for humanity to only those who looked like him or shared his ethnicity or wore the name Negro or even American. His love was for all humanity.

What does that mean for us today? It means that we are duty bound to re-think our relationship to the continent of Africa. So much of the wealth of Africa has been taken from her—either in the form of humankind who were enslaved and forced to produce wealth in America or in the form of minerals and precious ores and land that others went in and claimed as theirs by some kind of divine right while the people there were subjugated and treated as less than human. The entire Western world owes a great debt to Africa. Yet today, when Africa faces its cataclysmic AIDS crisis, little aid is forthcoming from the Western world. But I celebrate Martin today by joining him in his regard for the life of every human being by declaring that we must make a commitment to Africa, land of our ancestors and source of much of our wealth. Our nation, out of gratitude, should be forgiving the debts of Africa and pouring resources there to end the AIDS crisis. How can a continent that has given up so much of herself to the world now owe the world for loans. When did Africa ever collect her debts?

As we celebrate Martin Luther King today, we are duty bound to call on every national leader to carefully examine and responsibly communicate the reasons for the impending wars around the globe. What Martin calls on us for is costly; it is risky, but war is more costly and a greater risk. Some say he was unrealistic in his unwavering commitment to non-violence. Most say it is foolish, but I guarantee you that if every citizen across the world took the risk to say to his or her leaders, I require you, even at the risk of my own death or imprisonment, to find alternatives to war, we would drastically reduce the potential for war. If individuals all over the globe would live lives of non-violence without any justification for harming one’s neighbor or subjecting one’s neighbor to indignities and poverty to pay for one’s own luxury, and if we reared their children to understand the meaning of “fair” and “share” in their deepest sense, we could eradicate humankinds’ propensity for war.

If everyone of us would struggle to know the meaning of the words “fair” and “share” in our own lives with less of a sense of entitlement, we could do much to eradicate hunger and disease and the vestiges of poverty that result in resentment and anger on the part of those who live such paltry lives in the shadows of our plenty. Why do we have to have 10 pairs of shoes of matching colors instead of five? Why do we have to have houses filled with so much junk that we have a hard time keeping it clean and wish we could leave half of it behind when we move? Why should some children have clean water, nourishing food and excellent educations while other barely eke out life from day to day and die at shamefully early ages? I used to say about my own children, what did they do so special that entitled them to luxury while others suffered so. (And we were far from rich, but we had so much more than most of the world’s people.) Why should CEO’s of corporations earn exorbitant sums of money while most of the world’s people live on bare subsistence? These are the puzzling questions a celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King should raise in our hearts and souls.

As an educator, I am duty bound to protect the rights of every child to an enriching and liberating education, for to fail in this charge is to subject some of God’s children to prison and poverty while others go off to Harvard and Yale and Stanford and UCLA, right here next door. Let us leave here today determined to not spend another year celebrating the TV version of Martin Luther King. Let’s discover the real man, even with his faults and weaknesses, but certainly with his incredible commitment to humanity.

Dr. Sylvia Rousseau is currently superintendent of District I in the Los Angeles Unified School District. She formerly served as Santa Monica High School's principal from 1993 to 2000.