Monday, August 28th marks the 60th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s March on Washington. It is an aching American tragedy that we find ourselves where we are today—with issues of race, arguably, as divisive, and consequential as in King’s time.
From the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on that humid August day, Dr. King delivered the words that shook the conscience of a nation in his “I Have a Dream” speech. His vision, “deeply rooted in the American dream,” called on us to rise into our highest aspirations as a people.
I was a toddler at the time, living just a few miles down the road from that hallowed ground, and King’s words would later shake me too. As I came of age in D.C. suburban schools, with a beautiful rainbow mix of the affluent and the impoverished, both the American ideal and King’s dream came to be deeply etched on my soul. I have always heard the clarion call of achieving a “more perfect union” as a responsibility inherited with citizenship—it led me to founding The Village Square here in Tallahassee.
Sixty years later, I fear every single day the promissory note for “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”—still unrealized by people of color—is now at risk for all Americans. As our divisions are getting the better of us, we are failing to meet the most basic requirements of a free people. Rather than gathering with neighbors to address challenges, we mainline the influence of bad actors. These conflict profiteers use our estrangement from each other to build lucrative careers or, worse yet, win elected office—then they lead us, inevitably, to hate each other more.
In his last book “Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?” King offered us this stark warning: “We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.” To me, it’s tragically clear that we’ve now chosen to “perish together”—especially in the small decisions we make daily that keep us from being a part of each other’s lives. Instead, we’ve chosen to turn the TV to our preferred channels, where someone tells us how much we ought to hate those people who we no longer know.
Closing in on two decades of The Village Square gathering people together in person, I’ve had the honor to witness a beautiful alternative to our growing distance and anger. I’ve seen vast differences between people narrow through a simple recognition of good intentions and common humanity. And while knowing each other doesn’t magically solve problems, not knowing each other makes solutions to most anything that troubles us close to impossible.
If we believe in the ideal of King’s “table of brotherhood” and our founder’s extraordinary idea that we are all created equal, it is now an imperative that we walk toward each other. Being citizens in a country with a birthright of freedom demands no less of us—if not us then who? I think we can sense that we’re running out of time to make this manifest.
This “fierce urgency of now” led The Village Square to launch our 17th season in observance of the anniversary of Dr. King’s speech. We’ll kick our programming off at The Challenger Center on Friday, August 25th with a screening of “Join or Die: a film about why you should join a club — and why the fate of America depends on it.” And all year we’ll be asking you to join in, as we strive humbly to live into the dream — if only we choose to learn to live as brothers.
Liz Joyner is the founder of The Village Square, a nonprofit organization devoted to building civic trust between people who don’t look or think alike in American hometowns. Learn more online at tlh.villagesquare.us.
If you go details:
Friday, August 25th at The Challenger Center IMAX theater, The Village Square will screen the feature film “Join or Die.” (doors open at 6:30, $10 or free — you pick). Register: https://tlh.villagesquare.us/event/putnam-doc/
Thursday, October 5th at 7pm Dr. Robert Putnam will join The Village Square and Florida Humanities digitally (no charge). Register: https://tlh.villagesquare.us/event/join-or-die/
Group opportunities offered by The Village Square: https://tlh.villagesquare.us/blog/join-a-club/
The last Village Square “Collective Illusions” book club starts September 12th ahead of the October 17th Dinner at the Square with its author Todd Rose (participants will meet Rose): https://tlh.villagesquare.us/event/collective-illusions/
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