It is not enough to say we must not wage war.
It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it.
We must shift the arms race into the peace race.
— MLK
Most people don’t realize that Martin Luther King journeyed with his wife Coretta to Beirut in 1959. On this day when many people are remembering his life and celebrating his legacy, I’m also thinking about his time here in Beirut…
Over the past few years, there has been a notable increase in the publishing of works by and about Dr. King in Arabic. During the “Arab Spring,” thousands of copies of the Arabic version of “The Montgomery Story,” a comic book about the Montgomery Bus Boycott, were distributed around the Middle East. In 2012, the Global Americana Institute, along with Dar al-Saqi (the leading Arabic publishing house) published Marshall Frady’s biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. in Arabic.
Last year in Beirut, as you can see in the video below, Lebanon joined the world in celebrating the 50th anniversary of Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech with a flashmob (to the music of Bob Marley & Michael Jackson) on the Mediterranean (not far from my home). Over forty years ago, MLK traveled to Beirut–and today his memory here lives on…
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just…
— MLK
