Martin Luther King Jr: The long walk to Freedom, August 1963 NEW DATE

NEW DATE! SUNDAY Aug 27, 10:00 AM-11:30 AM

Spend an hour at the Lincoln Memorial with Dr. Martin Luther King, as we revisit the tumultuous events of August, 1963, when 250,000 persons from across the nation joined in the Great March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

Prof Ed will give a brief lecture on how Revd King got "woke" --his word, and a biblical metaphor from the Prophets he repeated through his life. He exhorted the graduates at Morehead college to be vigilant in "Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution."

The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom followed, months, even years of planning, on a hot afternoon, August 28, 1963. The purpose of the March was to advocate for the economic and thus civil equality of Black Americans, and beyond that to exhort the nation to an apocalyptic vision of justice derived from the Biblical prophets. The Revd Dr King, an early organizer and proponent of the March, was the last (in order of importance) of ten speakers; he preached, declaimed, demanded, exhorted his "I Have a Dream" speech -- largely without notes, and much of it extemporaneous, in which he called for a revision to the American Dream, a land of justice and mercy and equality.

My brief presentation examines the history of King's radicalism, and traces it back through the American Social Gospel Protestant movement, and back to early abolitionist thinking, specifically HD Thoreau's Civil Resistance. King got "woke" by reading the prophets, and exhorting a Biblical Justice, yet his philosophy of resistance was native to his experience and history as a black American, whose great-grandfather spent his life enslaved.

We will end by allowing the Revd King to say again his words, in his own voice, in this honored place.

Hear the program on your own phone speaker!

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Download this link and follow instructions https://livevoice.io/listen/646851