[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.''

[[Page H87]]

  

                          ____________________