[Congressional Record Volume 171, Number 9 (Thursday, January 16, 2025)]
[House]
[Pages H213-H215]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]





 HONORING AND CELEBRATING THE BIRTH OF CIVIL RIGHTS ICON, REVEREND DR. 
                        MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 3, 2025, the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Mfume) is recognized 
for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mr. MFUME. Mr. Speaker, I may not use the entire 60 minutes, but I 
appreciate the opportunity. I would encourage other Members of the 
House, who are still in town, to certainly come over and to seek 
recognition on this as I try to talk a bit about Dr. Martin Luther 
King, Jr., and why it is so very important that we, at least here in 
the House, take a moment or two or, in this case an hour or less, to 
reflect on the life, the legacy, and even some of the myths that have 
circulated over the years.
  Mr. Speaker, I am honored today to rise to really celebrate the birth 
of civil rights icon and leader, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who, had 
he lived, would have been 96 years of age yesterday, and to talk a bit 
about the dream that he tried to put forward in his short 39 years of 
life, a dream that he felt would be the North Star and the beacon for 
our country with respect to human rights and human dignity.
  As I thought about that and I thought about his dream, I am reminded 
of a passage in Scripture, Mr. Speaker, in the book of Genesis, chapter 
37 and verse 18, where it says, ``And when they saw him afar off, even 
before he came near unto them, they conspired against him to slay him. 
And they said one to another: Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now 
therefore, and let us slay him, and cast him into some pit, and we will 
say some evil beast hath devoured him and we shall see what will become 
of his dreams.''
  Well, that dream, despite the bullet of a lone assassin on April 4, 
1968, did very much grow, thrive, and replicate itself as a dream not 
just for a race of people or group of people but as a dream for an 
entire Nation.
  I remember in 1980, as a young member of the Baltimore City Council, 
petitioning the council to join with other local governments around the 
Nation to push for the establishment of a Martin Luther King, Jr., 
holiday in our respective towns, cities, and hamlets.
  For years, every January 15, I, along with so many others, would 
drive from Baltimore to Washington to join civil rights leaders and 
recording artists like Gil Scott-Heron, The Last Poets, Stevie Wonder, 
Diana Ross, Jesse Jackson, Congressman John Conyers, and thousands of 
others, and we would rally right here on the steps of this Capitol, in 
the cold, in January, on the 15th of each year, again, to petition for 
the establishment of a Martin Luther King, Jr., holiday.

                              {time}  1245

  I, like many others, recognize that that in and of itself was a 
beginning. The real beginning, however, has to go back to the Federal 
legislation that recognizes Martin Luther King Jr. Day as the bill 
introduced first by Congressman John Conyers of Michigan just days 
after the assassination of Dr. King.
  Unfortunately, it would take 15 years of those protests, 
perseverance, attempts, tenacity, and pure resolve by civil rights 
leaders and others across this Nation for the holiday to become 
recognized, and then finally signed into law by President Ronald Reagan 
in 1983. Then, unfortunately, it would take an additional 17 years for 
it to be recognized in all 50 States across the country.
  Fittingly, Martin Luther King Jr. Day was designed to intentionally 
inspire all Americans to volunteer and to give back to their 
communities. In fact, it is the only Federal holiday classified as a 
national day of service.
  Like so many others, I feel personally driven out of my respect for 
the life and legacy of Dr. King to find a way to celebrate this 
observance through acts of service, for it is only through reflecting 
the values and the morals and the principles of Dr. King into our lives 
that we will enact the dream that he has so often been associated with, 
where justice is the supreme ruler, freedom is the dominant creed, and 
equity the common practice.
  I would urge us to take a moment in this discussion or any other 
discussion, a moment of remembrance to really talk about Dr. Martin 
Luther King, Jr., the man, the myth, and the legacy.
  I think it is important to point out that Dr. King was born, as I 
said before, on January 15, 1929, in the segregated south in Atlanta, 
Georgia, where his grandfather began the family's tenure many, many 
years ago in another State as the pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist 
Church.
  After graduating from Morehouse College and Crozer Theological 
Seminary, Dr. King then enrolled in graduate studies at Boston 
University. It was in Boston where Dr. King would meet Coretta Scott, 
who was also a student at the nearby New England Conservatory. As we 
all know and as history has taught us, the two would ultimately marry, 
and Coretta Scott would become Coretta Scott King, and together they 
would be a formidable force in their own right, in their own time, and 
in joint pursuit of equality and justice for all.
  This remarkable partnership between Dr. King and Coretta Scott King 
also brought forth four children who grew up to embrace, uphold, and 
protect the values that their parents had devoted their lives to. I 
would be remiss if I did not uplift the names of Martin Luther King 
III, Bernice Albertine King, Yolanda Denise King, and Dexter Scott 
King, who we unfortunately lost last January.
  In 1954, as I indicated, their father became the pastor of the Dexter 
Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Dr. King, by this time, 
was a member of the Executive Committee of the NAACP and would join 
also the Montgomery Improvement Association. He would also help to 
create the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization 
that was formed to provide leadership for a growing and sustaining 
civil rights movement.
  Dr. King rose to prominence as a revered leader of that movement in 
1955, when a young woman, a seamstress by the name of Rosa Parks, 
refused to move to the back of the bus in Montgomery because of the 
color of her skin. Inspired by one woman's act of moral courage, in the 
face of an immoral systemic system of law, Dr. King led the Montgomery 
Bus Boycott that lasted 381 days and is heralded as the catalyst, that 
one act that began the modern civil rights movement.
  Now, in order to understand it, you have to keep it in its proper 
context. Citizens of Montgomery were so outraged that they could pay 
and were forced like everyone else to pay their taxes, that they could 
contribute to the economy, that they could find a way to sustain 
families, and that they could find a way, as all citizens did, to 
support the government there, only to be told that they could not ride 
a bus to get to work unless they sat in the back of the bus because of 
the color of their skin.
  It might be difficult to understand, but it is important to point out 
that those men and women who wanted to maintain and hold onto their 
dignity decided that they would walk to work, walk to the store, walk 
to church as opposed to sitting in the back of that bus any longer. Mr. 
Speaker, 381 days is a lot of days, and it takes a lot of resolve to 
get through something like that.
  It is one thing to see it in a history book. It is another thing if 
you are living it and you are walking all those miles every day, 
through summer, winter, fall, and spring, back and forth, to do the 
things that you had to do, like get to your job, the things you needed 
to do, to shop for groceries, and to be able to do anything else, but 
they did it for 381 days. They did it because of the inspiration that 
they got from Rosa Parks, and they did it also because of the 
inspiration that they got from this young preacher by the name of 
Martin Luther King, Jr.
  During that boycott, Dr. King was arrested. His home was bombed, and 
he was subjected to personal abuse over and over again. Now, he was 
arrested. No one else that did anything else to stop him was arrested, 
but he was arrested simply for articulating the problem, supporting the 
efforts of Ms. Parks, and encouraging a community to stand up and to 
speak for itself.
  As I said, his home was bombed. He was subjected to all kinds of 
insults and personal abuse. By the way, Dr. King was locked up in jail 
29 times for standing up for fairness and fair play.

[[Page H214]]

Yet, he never matched the violence he got with violence of his own.
  On June 5, 1956, a Federal District Court ruled that the State of 
Alabama's segregation policy on public buses was, in fact, 
unconstitutional. When the United States Supreme Court upheld that 
ruling, it was affirmed that the Montgomery Bus Boycott, led by Dr. 
King as a result of the efforts of Rosa Parks, was a true story of 
triumph, and it was, in fact, for many, year after year, a focal point 
on what civil disobedience can look like and what success can be born 
of it.

  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., would go on to travel for over 6 million 
miles, speaking over 2,500 times to launch his nonviolent protest 
movement that spanned the Nation. It began to grow, and it began to 
unfurl, and it found its way, reaching and touching the hearts of a lot 
of people who never even gave a thought about civil rights, but when 
they thought about their own selves, their own families, and their own 
desire to live and grow up in a country that many of whom had fought 
for overseas and defended with their lives, people then realized that 
this was not just about Martin Luther King or Rosa Parks, but it was, 
in fact, about the moral consciousness of our Nation.
  After that successful boycott, Dr. King was arrested again, this time 
in Birmingham. It was in Birmingham when he wrote and declared from a 
cell a number of things that America must, in fact, consider. He wrote 
on scraps of paper because they wouldn't even give him writing pads, 
but he wrote them nonetheless, and those letters are often referred to 
today as the ``Letter from Birmingham Jail,'' in which he fiercely 
declared: ``Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.''
  We hear that repeated over and over and over again. We should know 
that those words in that letter from that Birmingham jail cell brought 
national and international attention to the civil rights movement as we 
know it.
  Some of you will recall the grainy film and the black and white 
footage of the great March on Washington that occurred on August 28, 
1963, where the eyes and the ears of the entire world would be fixated 
on the magnificent power and oratory of Dr. King.
  I know, as a 14-year-old kid, remembering it, watching on a very 
small black and white TV set the delayed broadcast because live TV was 
not what it is today, and I couldn't believe as I sat there the number 
of people who appeared to be a sea of witnesses that had assembled.
  Dr. King that day was introduced as the moral leader of our Nation, 
and he delivered a message which empowered a quarter of a million 
people in attendance. His words that day brought my mother to tears as 
I sat in a row house in west Baltimore with my three younger sisters, 
all motionless from the eloquent force in which he delivered a message 
of love over hate in his famous ``I Have a Dream'' speech.
  At that historic March on Washington, more now than a half century 
ago, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., stood before a quarter of a million 
people, as I said, assembled at the memorial of one of our Nation's 
greatest leaders, and on that famous day Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., 
heir to Abraham Lincoln, addressed the crowd in these words:

       We have come to our Nation's Capital to cash a check.
       When the architects of our Republic wrote the magnificent 
     words in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence 
     that they, in fact, were signing a promissory note to which 
     all Americans would one day fall heir. This note was a 
     promise that all men and women would be guaranteed the 
     unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of 
     happiness.

  Yet, even before the Republic was born, it had already compromised 
the moral principles articulated in that Declaration of Independence 
and in that preamble to the Constitution and in all the other 
pronouncements that it used to justify its revolution against the 
king's tyranny by having subjected human beings, my own ancestors, to 
bondage of the flesh as well as bondage of the spirit.

                              {time}  1300

  The enslavement of the Negro, the annexation of the Hispanic, and the 
termination of the American Indian made our Nation's beginning an 
iniquitous conception because it was born in hypocrisy and dedicated to 
a false and twisted concept that White men were superior to non-White 
men and, therefore, somehow entitled to enslave them, oppress them, 
and, if necessary, destroy them.
  In the 200 years since the writing of that preamble to the 
Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and all the other 
pronouncements that America issued to justify, again, its revolution 
against tyranny, we have surpassed the wildest expectations and 
aspirations of our Founders.
  We have gone beyond human measure and created a nation of 
unparalleled power and unparalleled influence. We have grown from a 
small band of 13 impoverished Colonies to become the strongest, the 
most powerful nation on the face of the Earth.
  Our wealth as a nation is unmatched. America's military forces, 
perhaps and despite all other propaganda, really have no equal.
  Our industry and our technology remain superior, Europe, China, and 
Japan notwithstanding.
  Because of our ideals and our principles, we wield a mighty and 
forceful hand in world affairs. There can be no doubt that the American 
flag is still respected by billions of the world's people as a symbol 
of freedom from tyranny.
  Every morning at the start of school, millions of kids still around 
the country pause to utter the words: ``I pledge allegiance to the Flag 
of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it 
stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for 
all.''
  Yet, if Dr. King were here today, he might call into question the 
fact that that does not always still ring true because, in many ways, 
we are still not one nation. That is the challenge.
  Far too many of our citizens do not see their existence as having 
been due to or under the direction of God. We are not yet indivisible, 
and nowhere in our own lifetime can it be said that we have practiced 
liberty and justice for all of our people.
  The genius that our Founding Fathers bequeathed to us was to have 
been, if realized, a form of government based on opportunity but 
measured against the promise of America. In many respects, we have 
still fallen short in ways that continue to haunt us, plague us, and, 
unfortunately, divide us.
  Have things changed for the better? Yes. Has there been real and 
measurable progress? Yes. But it is not just a matter of having come a 
long, long way. It is, in fact, a matter of having still yet a long, 
long way to go.
  As we begin the celebration of Dr. King's 96th birthday, let it 
serve, I hope, as a reminder of a union that he forged in the Halls of 
Congress that ensured the signing and passage of the Civil Rights Act 
of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act into law in 1965.
  Dr. King's spirit should and really must renew our resolve, 
particularly as Members of Congress and as Americans of all walks of 
life, to stand for justice, fairness, and equal opportunity whenever 
and wherever possible.
  Across his life, Dr. King was awarded five honorary degrees, named 
Man of the Year by Time magazine, and, at the age of 35, became the 
youngest man to have received the Nobel Peace Prize, but all of that 
didn't matter to him.
  All the accolades and the other things that had been heaped upon him 
during his life--and, I am sure, since his death--really would not 
stack up to mean very much in the heart, soul, and mind of Martin 
Luther King, Jr.
  At 39 years of age, the person who led the nonviolent movement was 
taken from us in a cruel manner by the single bullet of a lone 
assassin. It really didn't matter, as he said, as he preached his own 
eulogy, what people said. What mattered is that he tried to live his 
life to exemplify the dream that he had and that still burns.
  I can remember the numbness I felt on that evening of April 4, 1968. 
Like so many others, I felt my heart race when I heard the words come 
over the radio that said Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is dead.
  When I reflect back on his life, as I am doing and I appreciate so 
many of you who are watching are also doing today, I am still reminded 
of a man who was unawed by opinion, unseduced by flattery, and 
undismayed by disaster.

[[Page H215]]

  He confronted his life with the courage of his convictions and then 
confronted his death with the courage of his faith.
  That is why, Mr. Speaker, I began by referencing that Scripture in 
the Book of Genesis, because Dr. Martin Luther King really was, and in 
the hearts of many of us remains, a dreamer. I will close by going back 
to that passage, Genesis 37: ``And when they saw him from afar, even 
before he had come near to them, they conspired against him to slay 
him. And they said one to another, behold the dreamer cometh. Come now 
therefore and let us slay him, and we will cast him into some old pit, 
and we will say that some evil beast has devoured him, and we shall see 
what becomes of his dreams.''
  Just like that passage in Genesis, that dream has lived on. It lives 
in the hearts and the minds of so many of us. It is a dream that young 
people look at and try to fashion themselves after. It is a dream that 
many of us who are much older will smile and go to our grave knowing 
that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was, in the truest sense, a true 
American that gave all he could, not just for his dream, but for his 
country.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________