Dr King Day: The Arc of the Moral Universe is Long, but it Bends Toward Justice
1) President Barack Hussein Obama frequently “quotes” Dr King: “The Arc of the Moral Universe is Long but it Bends Toward Justice.” Actually this quotation was from a sermon from the great Unitarian New England Minister Theodore Parker in his advocacy for the abolition of slavery. In his 1853 sermon on “Justice and the Conscience,” Parker declared:
“I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.”
2) After the voting rights marchers in 1965 from Selma to Montgomery belatedly arrived after Bloody Sunday at the steps of the Alabama state capital, Dr Martin Luther King Jr delivered a sermon with the captivating cadence, “How Long, Not Long,” between various biblical and Parker’s sermon reference. Several whites including Unitarian minister Rev. James J. Reeb and civil rights workers such as Viola Gregg Liuzzo, from Detroit, had been killed on the highway in the Selma civil rights event that attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Liuzzo was the first white woman to be killed in the decades long anti-anpartheid freedom struggle in the United States. Of course most of the casualties were African American. The Selma marches led to the passage of the quite successful Voting Rights Act of 1965.
3) I am sure if he were alive today, he would stand at the gates of Gaza or Port-au-Prince or encircled Bethlehem and proclaim: “How Long, Not Long!” Indeed how long do we turn or backs to the quasi-genocide against Palestinians and the persistent poverty in the Caribbean and sub-Sahara Africa. How long do we use the selfish, evil mantra of national security and vital interests to perpetuate such mass suffering while astonishingly claiming to be the greatest nation on Earth: “How long, not long!”
4) Dr King received his Ph.D. from Boston University in Systematic Theology in 1955. His dissertation, which at times digressed from best practices in citing and acknowledging one’s sources, was entitled: “A Comparison of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Wiseman.” I received my B.A. in Government from the same university.