After reading through one of Dr. King's last published and most profound works, Where Do We Go From Here?: Chaos or Community, I realized that King's own words says it all concerning the political, socio-economic, and moral crisis represented in Haiti today and represented in racial inequality throughout the world. Read, remember, and act. Happy King Day.
(All of the following words come from Where Do We Go From Here?: Chaos or Community.)
"To be a Negro in America is to hope against hope."
"Being a Negro in America [or throughout the world] means trying to smile when you want to cry. It means trying to hold on to physical life amid psychological death. It means the pain of watching your children grow up with clouds of inferiority in their mental skies. It means having your legs cut off, and then being condemned for being a cripple. It means seeing your mother and father spiritually murdered by the slings and arrows of daily exploitation, and then being hated for being an orphan."
"However deeply American Negroes are caught in the struggle to be at last at home in our homeland of the United States, we cannot ignore the larger world house in which we are also dwellers."
"Racism is no mere American phenomenon. Its vicious grasp knows no geographical boundaries."
"We see racism in its more sophisticated form: neocolonialism... Either they [people of color] share in the blessings of the world or they organize to break down and overthrow those structures or governments which stand in the way of their goals."
"Another grave problem that must be solved if we are to live creatively in our world house is that of poverty on an international scale... There is nothing new about poverty. What is new, however is that we now have the resources to get rid of it."
"The rich nations must use their vast resources of wealth to develop the underdeveloped, school the unschooled and feed the unfed."
"The hard cold facts today indicate that the hope of people of color in the world may well rest on the American Negro and his inability to reform the structure of racist imperialism from within and thereby turn the technology and wealth of the West to the task of liberating the world form want."
"The agony of the poor impoverishes the rich; the betterment of the poor enriches the rich. We are inevitably our brother's keeper because we are our brothers brother. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly."