American national holidays celebrate the people and events that define us as a nation. We celebrate the presidents who have led our nation, our soldiers who fight and have fought for our nation and those who work every day building our nation. We celebrate America’s independence, give thanks as early settlers did for the bounty of the land and celebrate the New Year.
Yet America, despite its reputation and our recent history, does not celebrate many individuals, perhaps telling us something else about the meaning of our country. We celebrate the birth of the founder of a major world religion, the birth of the European founder of our continent and we celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday. And of these three, it is only Martin Luther King, Jr. that can truly be called an American, having been born, raised and buried on our soil.
Tomorrow we celebrate King’s birth. It is proper to ask ‘Why Martin Luther King, Jr.?’ He was not the founder of a religion, though King was a Christian and a religious man. He did not discover a continent, though King lived and worked upon it. Instead King found a people, by finding and trying to apply the universal promise the American founders discovered at our beginning.
It is this last reason we celebrate the birth of Martin Luther King, Jr., because he found the promise of America and held strongly to it, awakening the promise in others and dying for it. It is a “self-evident” promise America still struggles to realize, a “self-evident” promise many worldwide struggle to achieve, a promise that all people are “created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Though King was eloquent, he did not write these words. He tried and helped others try to live them. It is this reason we honor Martin Luther King, Jr., for having the courage to show us who we are, and the strength to lead us so that we might be.
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