Keep Moving

I heard Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. speak for the first time when he gave the Founders’ Day address in Spelman College’s Sisters Chapel during my senior year of college.

- Marian Wright Edelman

His subject that day was “Keep Moving from This Mountain.” Dr. King said he wanted to start by taking us way back to the people Moses was called to lead out of Egypt of slavery and into the Promised Land, and noted that after they realized they would have to go through a long and difficult wilderness to get there, three kinds of attitudes emerged:

“One group wanted to go back to Egypt: they felt that the fleshpots of Egypt were more to be desired than the ordeals of emancipation.

Then you had a second group that abhorred the idea of going back to Egypt--and yet could not quite attain the discipline and the sacrifice to go on to Canaan. These people chose the line of least resistance.

There was a third group, probably the creative minority, which said in substance, ‘We will go on in spite of the obstacles, in spite of the difficulty, in spite of the sacrifices that we will have to make.’”

Dr. King told us we could find the same three groups in every movement toward freedom and fulfillment. Of course, most of us would like to believe we’d immediately be in the third group. But Dr. King said he wanted to focus on the second.