The following is excerpted from the Church News. To read the full article, CLICK HERE.
On Aug. 28, 1963, American civil rights activist and Baptist minister Martin Luther King Jr. stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., and delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech to more than 250,000 supporters.
In that iconic address, he shared his vision for the “beloved community” in which “people of every race, religion and nation could live together in peace and harmony and work together for the common progress of humankind.”
Speaking to the Brigham Young University campus community on Tuesday, Sept. 28, Dr. King’s oldest son, Martin Luther King III, talked again of his father’s hope for the beloved community and then issued a call to students.
“Students of Brigham Young University, this is your time and your appointment with history is fast arriving,” King said. “Arise and answer the call, just as an earlier generation of young people rose up, answered the call of history and helped to win the historic victories of the modern civil rights movement. The torch of leadership is being passed to your generation, and the world is counting on you to light the way forward to a brighter future.”
King was the first in a six-part series of forums at BYU on “Creating the Beloved Community.” In his remarks, King not only described what the beloved community should be like but what individuals can do to build it.
“In the beloved community of my father’s dream, poverty, hunger and homelessness will not be tolerated because standards of human decency will not allow it,” King said. “Racism and all forms of bigotry and prejudice will be replaced by an all-inclusive spirit of sisterhood and brotherhood.”
Creating the beloved community is about creating hope for the forgotten, disadvantaged and marginalized, regardless of their race, and building bridges of greater mutual understanding and cooperation “across the gulfs of suspicion and distrust that divide our communities,” King explained. “It’s about healing the wounds of history with the light of truth and compassion.”
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