(WASHINGTON, D.C., 1/17/2022) – The US Council of Muslim Organizations leadership take this day commemorating the birth of Martin Luther King 93 years ago Jan 15 1929 as an opportunity for our country to reflect on where we stand as a society, a nation, and as Americans when measured against the values of equality and justice that Dr. King struggled and died for April 4, 1968 at just 39-years-old.
Specifically, our reflection is made with the insight and urgency that Dr. King immortalized from his Alabama prison cell in his justly celebrated “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” He wrote:
“Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of people willing to be coworkers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood and sisterhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.”
Nearly six decades on, Dr. King’s words remain acutely relevant societal measures and a powerful cry of warning – perhaps even more so today – for Americans to rectify the fundamental inequities within our society and to alter how we deploy in the world the considerable blessing of power bestowed upon us as a nation, for a time.
Both skin color and earnings (and these, too, are connected) remain unconscionably accurate predictors of how well you and your children will live and flourish in America. These surface measures, in shamefully large proportion, will greatly determine the quality of your education, the wholesomeness of your diet, the conditions of your housing, your social mobility and freedom, the reach of your political voice, the components of your health, and ultimately how long you will live and even the mortality rates of your offspring.
We call for the long overdue American reforms of these seven unalienable human rights for all:
- Free access to equal opportunities of education
- Guarantees of wholesome, sufficient daily nutrition and clean water
- Fair and unrestricted housing in our society and an end to homelessness
- Equality in hiring and pay across the spectrum of industry and commerce
- The open right to vote and directly elect our public servants in the easiest ways of participation available to us, unfettered by discriminatory “preclearance” restrictions and gerrymandering, with the right to easily and speedily challenge all acts of voting discrimination
- Free healthcare for all without exception or preconditions
- Free practice of religion, including its daily rituals, dress codes, and the establishment of places and institutions of worship
On this path of moral rectitude and equity, we must reform our foreign policy and involvements with other peoples and nations on the clear and strong bases of upholding for them the same values of freedom from oppression and support for popular representative governance in all its effective and representative forms that we claim as an ideal and right for ourselves.
On this day of remembrance, let us measure and base our personal, societal, and global policies and interactions by and on the great razor of equality that Dr. King epitomized and challenged us to become, lest America’s good works are rendered utterly futile with God, in this world and in the Hereafter.
For the real measure of our righteousness as a people and as a nation is as Dr. King stated it for himself at the University of Minnesota, St. Paul, in 1967:
“I know that justice is indivisible and injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. I’m concerned about justice for everybody the world over.”
We ask God to guide us, as individuals and as a nation, along the pathways of peace from darkness into light and to a straight way of true salvation.
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