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BY JULIA CARREON-LAGOC
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Sunday, January 22, 2017
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HERE in the U.S. of A. it is Martin Luther King Day, Jan. 16, 2017 as I exhume this after a 3-day weekend. The column below first appeared in Panay News, Nov. 11, 2008. Read on…
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THERE was no magical dreamcoat. His was only a booming voice that could only spring from every fiber of his being – crying for freedom: “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed.”
That was Martin Luther King, Jr., a dreamer for his people, speaking in 1963 to an international assembly said to be more than 200,000 at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. His demand for “equal justice for all citizens under the law” inspired not only his fellow black Americans but also other oppressed people in the world.
My cousin, Dr. Irma “Mimi” Gedang, has e-mailed me about the U.S. celebrating the MARTIN LUTHER KING DAY, Monday, Jan. 17, actually two days after the birth anniversary, Jan. 15, (1929) of the eloquent Baptist minister turned champion of human rights. Mimi has sent me unearthing from my scrapbook of souvenirs scrawled notes on the great civil rights activist. And so I remember one afternoon in San Francisco when my daughter’s family brought me to the Yerba Buena Center, a restful public square in San Francisco.
Yerba Buena’s central attraction is a man-made waterfall where the roar of the falling water echoes the strength of conviction in the quotes from Martin Luther King, Jr. These were engraved in the concrete panels that surround the waterfall, to wit:
“No, no we are not satisfied and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.” Below this is the place where and when he made the speech: Washington, D.C., 1963.
From his San Francisco address delivered in 1956 at the height of racism: “I believe that the day will come when all God’s children from bass black to treble white will be significant on the constitution’s keyboard.”
Felled at 39 by a racist’s bullet, his last address was prophetic of his martyrdom: “Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its fate but I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will and if it allowed me to go up the mountain and I took over and I’d seen the promised land, I cannot go there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get the promise.”
Excerpts from other speeches are in the other panels as translated in different languages. One has characters that looked Chinese to us. One looking similar to it we took to be Japanese. Another with proliferation of dots we thought to be Arabic. But one panel is unmistakably ours, yes, in beautiful Filipino:
“Ngayon ay panahon ng pagbabago. Sa lahat ng dako ng daigdig ang mga mamamayan ay naghihimagsik laban sa mga makalumang pamamara-an ng pagsasamantala at pang-aapi at mula sa sinapupunan ng marupok na daigdig ay isinisilang ang mga bagong pamamara-an ng katarungan at pagkapantay-pantay. Ngayon higit kailan man ang mga mamamayang dati-dati ay walang lakas at walang malay ay natutong makipaglaban.”
The very words that could come from our own idealistic young — Lean Alejandro, Edgar Jopson, Emmanuel Lacaba, and several others who, like Martin Luther King, Jr., were victims of violent death.
A recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize for Peace in 1964, King said: “I accept the Nobel Peace Prize for Peace at a moment when twenty-two million Negroes of the United States of America are engaged in a creative battle to end the long night of racial injustice… Yet when the years have rolled past…men and women will know and children will be taught that we have a finer land, a better people, a more noble civilization – because these humble children of God were willing to suffer for righteousness’ sake.”
The dream of Martin Luther King, Jr. for his people has come true in the respect accorded to black Americans and in the positions of authority many of them occupy. (juliaclagoc@yahoo.com)
Note: Julia Carreon-Lagoc was a columnist of Panay News for two decades. She pops up with Accents now and then./PN ed at (juliaclagoc@yahoo.com)/PN
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