A Call to Conscience, A Call to Action

Address by Interim Chancellor Richard Herman to the annual campus-community shared celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day

January 16, 2005

The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was a prophet for our time. Like the prophets in the Old Testament, he was cursed and blessed with the ominous power of truth-telling—truth-telling if it hurt, truth-telling if it angered, truth-telling even if it threatened his own life. He spoke the painful truths about America’s original sin of slavery, of subjugation and segregation, of inequality so savage we now almost cannot imagine that good people did not recognize the evil of it. Equality before the law? Not for you, black man. School books for your children? Here, use our hand-me-downs. And ride in the back of the bus, live in neighborhoods with your own kind, clean our houses, cook our meals, change our children’s diapers, sweep our floors—and do these things for us from generation to generation to generation, in relentless centuries of injustice.

In 1968, just before his death, Martin Luther King visited the black Cotton Street neighborhood in the country town of Marks, Mississippi, where the poorest of the poor lived in shotgun shacks that, every year, were inundated by flood waters. At the end of Sims Street, he saw a house that seemed to be floating in a giant lake. Dr. King insisted on visiting the family in that house, and he did so by small boat. The symbolism of this—this island of searing poverty existing in an American sea of plenty—was too much even for a prophet to endure. In that flooded home, in Marks, Mississippi, in a lake at the end of Sims Street, Dr. King broke down and cried. From that day on, the people of the Cotton Street neighborhood have called that shack “the house where Martin wept.”

A few weeks later, Martin Luther King was dead, martyred.

So much has changed in the 37 years since. We are here today on a national holiday that honors and remembers the birth of the very man who pained and angered white America. Laws that once imposed injustice in the country that had first declared all people to be created equal have fallen. For more than a generation now, America has mustered the political will to correct its past injustices through legal affirmative action. Schools, public places and the world of work are open to everyone—and laws now protect people from the discrimination that once defiled our nation.

Honestly, America is a better place.

But so much is unchanged. Dr. King always knew that his struggle for racial justice was truly a struggle for social justice. In his words: “…we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” The poverty that brought Dr. King to tears in Marks, Mississippi, is still with us, in all our towns and cities and suburbs. Poverty’s face is black and brown and white--and every other color of the human rainbow. Poverty parses out the chances children have to use the gifts God gave them. My child will live in a nice house filled with books and music and Disney fairy tales. My child will attend good schools, read several years beyond grade, take extra tutoring for math. Your child? Well, your child will not have these things.

Is that not enough, still, to make Dr. King weep?

I am the Interim Chancellor of one of the greatest universities in the world. I am a man with power, and, yet, I cannot change the seemingly immutable inequalities that pain me, and you, and all right-thinking people. I cannot make justice roll down like waters. What I can do is this: I can ask what I and the University of Illinois, its faculty and its students, should and can be doing to help all children get their fair chance at the American Dream.

It has become passé in recent decades to remind those to whom much is given that much will be expected, to remind them that the measure of a person’s education is not only how well you write, compute, or invent—or how much money you amass. “We must remember that intelligence is not enough,” Dr. King once said. “Intelligence plus character—that is the goal of true education. The complete education gives one not only the power of concentration, but worthy objectives on which to concentrate.” In other words, knowledge is not all this great university must impart. Knowledge must have a moral dimension, be yoked to social purpose. The idea that all children should get a fair chance at reaching their human capacities is a clear and worthy social purpose.

If I do not have the power to change the seemingly immutable, I do have the power to ask that the staff and faculty and students of the University of Illinois, in the next year, launch a public conversation among themselves and with the Champaign-Urbana community about how the value of social justice in America can be at the heart of our mission. My hope is that our conversation will become a template for how America’s other colleges and universities also can begin to ask themselves the question, “What do we owe society beyond pure knowledge?” What do we as a university and as citizens owe to our local communities, state and nation? How can we translate the vast knowledge and resources of the university to practical use in our governments, social agencies and schools?

And so important: How do we better educate our students to realize that they enhance their lives and the lives of their families when they give back? How do we make them realize that their careers are not only their careers but a patch of the quilt that makes up their communities and country? How do we teach the new generation of students that it is not passé to believe it is their duty to contribute to the greater civic good--to believe in their heads and their hearts that doing well and doing good are pieces of the same fabric?

These questions return us to the moral truth of Martin Luther King: “…we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” That day of prophesized perfection will never come. It is a point in the distance we must forever struggle to reach, knowing we never will. Yet I believe we can get ever closer to that visionary place--and that it is the university’s moral duty to help us all do so.

“…America is essentially a dream,” Dr. King once said, “a dream as yet unfulfilled.”

Today, let us begin to dream anew.

Our task is to move the university, our students and faculty, our community, and the country one or two or three steps closer to the dream--the dream of a perfect America.

Thank you.