Sunday, January 18, 2009

Martin Luther King Poem: One Day

I am showing this postard of Martin Luther King in honor of his birthday — actually January 15, but now celebrated in the United States on the third Monday of January.



One day …

Youngsters will learn words they will not understand.

Children from India will ask:
What is hunger?
Children from Alabama will ask:
What is racial segregation?
Children from Hiroshima will ask:
What is the atomic bomb?
Children at school will ask:
What is war?

You will answer them.
You will tell them:

Those words are not used any more.
Like stagecoaches, galleys or slavery.

Words no longer meaningful.

That is why they have been
removed from the dictionaries.




This postcard was published by Leeds Postcards of England. The text on the back of the postcard is as follows:

Martin Luther King was born 1929 in
Atlanta, Georgia. He first attracted national attention in the struggle to desegregate (sic) the American South with the 1955 bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama. Over the next decade he supported and helped organise many other actions and campaigns.

His prophetic and inspiring vision of equality and dignity for American blacks ('I have a dream…') has echoed down the years. He was assassinated - with the apparent complicity of the FBI amd CIA - in 1968.

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