    [Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 6 (Wednesday, January 10, 2018)]
    [House]
    [Pages H86-H87]
    From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

                    CELEBRATING MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., DAY

      The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentlewoman from
    Washington (Ms. Jayapal) for 5 minutes.
      Ms. JAYAPAL. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in honor of the upcoming
    holiday remembering Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
      As a lifelong activist fighting for immigrants, civil and human
    rights, and now as a Member of Congress, Dr. King has been a deep and
    central inspiration throughout my life. His work has helped me to make
    possible the path that I have taken, from being a 16-year-old immigrant
    girl who came to this country by herself for college, to serving, now,
    as the first Indian-American woman elected to the United States House
    of Representatives--and it is the courage and the fight of Dr. King
    that made my journey possible.
      I knew of Dr. King first because of his connection to Mahatma Gandhi,
    a great leader from my own birth country of India. Like Gandhi, Dr.
    King was a once-in-a-generation leader. Like Gandhi, the problems that
    Dr. King tackled were once seen as insurmountable problems,
    institutional barriers of race and class that seemed as if, if taken
    on, would topple society as we knew it, tall walls of tradition and
    practice that kept our society segregated and divided.
      But that did not stop him from speaking out, organizing, and leading
    a growing movement that reminded the leaders of our country of the very
    dream that made America possible: that all men and women were created
    equal and that we should be judged by the content of our character and
    not the color of our skin.
      Dr. King's gift was in his unique ability to bring truth, compassion,
    and justice together for a better future and to remind us of how much
    we share even across our differences. He followed Gandhi's principles
    of nonviolent resistance, also known as satyagraha: ``satya'' meaning
    truth, and ``graha'' meaning adherence to truth.
      Satyagraha then meant insistence on truth, and that is what Dr. King
    preached and acted upon: truth about ending segregation and
    discrimination, truth about ending the war in Vietnam, truth about
    lifting up sanitation workers and ending poverty, truth, ultimately,
    that it is love and not hate that builds our character and our
    collective society.
      If Dr. King were here with us today, he would call on us to have
    faith in our fight for justice and to substitute courage for caution.
    He would call on us to work passionately and unrelentingly for the very
    vision of our country that inspires so many around the world, for that
    more perfect Union that we know is still ahead of us, for that society
    that remembers that we are all better off when we are all better off.

      Dr. King would remind us that justice is what love looks like in
    public. He would call on us to move into that plane of higher
    education, that plane of moral consciousness where we simply cannot
    stand by as injustice occurs around us.
      He would call on us to address economic inequality by raising the
    minimum wage and enacting real tax reform whose benefits accrue to the
    masses and not to the top 1 percent and the wealthiest corporations.
      Dr. King would call on us to pass the Dream Act and support the
    futures of 1.5 million young people across the country. He would call
    on us to expand and support the Affordable Care Act and healthcare for
    everyone so that no one is one healthcare crisis away from bankruptcy.
      Our work is still to fight for justice and build that beloved
    community where each of us has a place to stand regardless of the color
    of our skin or where we live or how much money we have in our pockets,
    and in this beloved community, we would tackle the legacies of racism
    and implicit bias that we all carry with us with courage and with
    fortitude. We would work together to build that community that inspires
    us and to leave a world to our children that makes us proud, and, most
    importantly, we operate always from a place of generosity and abundance
    rather than fear and scarcity.
      From that jail cell in Alabama, Dr. King wrote: ``We are caught in an
    inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of
    destiny,'' or, as the great civil rights leader Reverend Joseph Lowery
    once said to me during the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride: ``We may
    have come over on different ships, but we are all in the same boat
    now.''
      To make a difference, to truly serve the people, it only takes
    courage and coming together as a collective, across the aisle, across
    rural and urban, across Black, White, and Brown. Dr. King showed us
    what that really looks like, and he died because he was compelled to
    stand for making a reality from a dream of what was possible only in a
    country as great as the United States of America.
      Today, as we remember and honor Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., we
    remember, too, that if we are courageous, if we put people over
    politics, our actions have the power to change lives, to push that
    moral arc of the universe more quickly towards justice. As Dr. King
    said: ``We must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We
    cannot turn back.''

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