The Heroic Leadership of MLK

As an American History teacher, I’ve always been deeply interested in stories of human liberty. And it is in the quest for increasing human liberty that we celebrate Martin Luther King each year. This year marks the 90th anniversary of King’s birth; he was born on January 15, 1929.

My interest in King goes back to my own school days and probably had more to do with watching Eyes on the Prize on my local PBS station than anything any of my teachers did in school. Several years ago, I got to spend a week touring Civil Rights History sites with the narrator of that classic documentary series, Julian Bond, who also happened to have been one of the founders of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and the retired Chairman of the NAACP. Bond was a giant in the Civil Rights Movement, certainly not as large as King, but inspiring in many ways. It is Bond’s example as a Civil Rights educator that first inspired me to think about taking students on a teaching tour of some of the places in the South where human liberty was pursued with great heroism and vigor. St. Luke’s will take its first such trip this March; we hope it becomes a mainstay of our educational programming.

On this anniversary of King’s birth, though, I find myself returning to his life and its symbolic power for us as Americans, as teachers and students, and as parents. King exemplifies heroic leadership in ways that are particularly relevant to us today and particularly powerful in the context of schools. A small sampling of facts from King’s life reminds us of some simple truths...

Read the full post: The Heroic Leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

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