Dr. Martin Luther King Jr & Hawaii

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

From Hawaii Magazine:

One of Dr. King's most famous and beautiful speeches regarding Hawaii was given during a September 1959 visit before a special session at the Hawaii Legislature:

“I come to you with a great deal of appreciation and great feeling of appreciation, I should say, for what has been accomplished in this beautiful setting and in this beautiful state of our Union.

King found the Islands’ multiethnic population and everyday society to be an inspirational source of “racial harmony” as the struggle of African Americans made headlines across the continental U.S.

Hawaiian flower leis were worn by King and other protestors at the March from Selma to Montgomery. Click the link for photos and more on MLK’s connection with the islands:
https://www.hawaiimagazine.com/content/w...elma-march

Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
—Mary Oliver R.I.P. 1/17/19

[Rob Tucker]

Mahalo for sharing this.

For my part I have always appreciated the fact that in Hawaii everyone is a minority.

[SBH]

That’s beautiful, thanks for sharing!

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

I have always appreciated the fact that in Hawaii everyone is a minority.


We can only wonder how often MLK thought back to his time in the islands. Would Hawaii emerge as the land of promise, a place where equal rights and racial tolerance already existed in some degree? Although not perfect, during in the late 1950's and early 1960's our islands might have offered a vision, a real world example he could carry forward as he continued on his journey:

"As I think of the struggle that we are engaged in in the South land, we look to you (Hawaii) for inspiration and as a noble example, where you have already accomplished in the area of racial harmony and racial justice, what we are struggling to accomplish in other sections of the country, and you can never know what it means to those of us caught for the moment in the tragic and often dark midnight of man’s inhumanity to man, to come to a place where we see the glowing daybreak of freedom and dignity and racial justice.”

Perhaps an ephemeral but lucid memory of the islands may even have inspired the words:

"And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land."