skip navigation

Beyond The King's Speech

By DVCHC Women's Hockey, 01/20/14, 10:00AM EST

Share

Remembering A Great Man's Advice For Students Like Us

"I have a dream." 

These words repeated often in honor of a heroic American and the noble movement he helped lead to the "mountain top."

Our suggestion: don't let this MLK Day, the only federal holiday to honor a non-president, pass as just another reacquainting with the  "King's Speech."

While Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. certainly did have an eloquent dream for civil rights, this Nobel Peace Prize winner also noted the "glaring contrast of poverty and wealth," the hypocrisy of the media and the madness of war, "an enemy of the poor."

Fighting for peace and equality across many fronts, King spread words of wisdom that even included advice and challenges for students like us.

"Intelligence is not enough," he pushed.  "Intelligence plus character -- that is the goal of true education."

King told a crowd in 1948 that "one of the chief aims of education" is "to save man from the morass of propaganda."  "Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction."

On October 26, 1967, six months before he was assassinated, King met with students at Barratt Junior High School in Philadelphia.  Standing downtown, a mere 10 minutes away from the Class of 1923 Ice Rink,  he asked a question our college athletes can still relate to today: "What's your life's blueprint?"



 

"We must remember that intelligence is not enough.  Intelligence plus character -- that is the goal of true education.  The complete education gives one not only power of concentration, but worthy objectives upon which to concentrate."



What Is Your Life's Blueprint?



I want to ask you a question, and that is: What is your life's blueprint?

Whenever a building is constructed, you usually have an architect who draws a blueprint, and that blueprint serves as the pattern, as the guide, and a building is not well erected without a good, solid blueprint.

Now each of you is in the process of building the structure of your lives, and the question is whether you have a proper, a solid and a sound blueprint.

I want to suggest some of the things that should begin your life's blueprint. Number one in your life's blueprint, should be a deep belief in your own dignity, your worth and your own somebodiness. Don't allow anybody to make you feel that you're nobody. Always feel that you count. Always feel that you have worth, and always feel that your life has ultimate significance.

Secondly, in your life's blueprint you must have as the basic principle the determination to achieve excellence in your various fields of endeavor. You're going to be deciding as the days, as the years unfold what you will do in life — what your life's work will be. Set out to do it well.

And I say to you, my young friends, doors are opening to you--doors of opportunities that were not open to your mothers and your fathers — and the great challenge facing you is to be ready to face these doors as they open.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the great essayist, said in a lecture in 1871, "If a man can write a better book or preach a better sermon or make a better mousetrap than his neighbor, even if he builds his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door."

This hasn't always been true — but it will become increasingly true, and so I would urge you to study hard, to burn the midnight oil; I would say to you, don't drop out of school. I understand all the sociological reasons, but I urge you that in spite of your economic plight, in spite of the situation that you're forced to live in — stay in school.

And when you discover what you will be in your life, set out to do it as if God Almighty called you at this particular moment in history to do it. don't just set out to do a good job. Set out to do such a good job that the living, the dead or the unborn couldn't do it any better.

If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music, sweep streets like Leontyne Price sings before the Metropolitan Opera. Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well. If you can't be a pine at the top of the hill, be a shrub in the valley. Be the best little shrub on the side of the hill.

Be a bush if you can't be a tree. If you can't be a highway, just be a trail. If you can't be a sun, be a star. For it isn't by size that you win or fail. Be the best of whatever you are.

— From the estate of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Most Popular Articles