MLK Day | Cincinnati

Twenty years ago today in Cincinnati, we began an annual breakfast to honor Rev., Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. During much of that time, I've frequently chaired the event, and I am again today's co-chairperson. Reflecting on Dr. King's life and dream of a beloved community has been an essential part of her MLK Challenge model. Putting young people first, her goal has been that students and the community will start their day with a better understand Dr. King's dream of equality and true social justice. She has shaped an event in Cincinnati that provides students with opportunities to reflect on Dr. King and service through their art, scholarship and leadership will allow them to connect their service to Dr. King's life of action. 

Quotes serve as an easy reflection starting-point. Some communities include a sheet of quotes in the challenge packet and encourage student leaders to discuss them over breakfast with their family. 

MLK quotes --

• Everybody can be great, because everybody can serve. You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love.
• I have the audacity to believe that people everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality, and freedom for their spirits.
• Life's most persistent and urgent question is, what are you doing for others?
• Let us move on in these powerful days, these days of challenge, to make America what it ought to be. 
• Although social change cannot come overnight, we must always work as though it were a possibility in the morning.
• An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.
• All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.
• Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.
• Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
• Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
• We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.
• I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.
• The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.
• Although social change cannot happen overnight, we must always work as though it were a possibility in the morning. 
• These students are not struggling for themselves alone. They are seeking to save the soul of America. They are taking our whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers in the formulation of the Constitution & the Declaration of Independence. In sitting down at the lunch counters, they are in reality standing up for the best in the American dream. One day historians will record this student movement as one of the epics of our heritage.

Today's breakfast has a long history. Beginning with the Arts Consortium and the Cincinnati Historical Society it is today co-sponsored by the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center and the Greater Cincinnati Martin Luther King, Jr. Coalition, but remains community focused on service. 

Have a blessed MLK day of service.