Thank you for bringing your children out on a cold Friday night to participate in Arts for Martin. ARTech has posted a photo album including pictures of the Elms. Until I sat in the audience, watching the Elms and Tamaracks perform and then watching them watch the rest of the tribute, I don't think I fully understood the importance of the event.
What they saw might have surprised them; it did, in fact surprise me -- A community of people honoring Dr. King and his work in a very personal, very emotional way. Our kids saw how important the legacy of Dr. King still is, even in our little corner of the world. In the faces of the other performers, they saw how much his work and love and death changed this nation.
Textbooks and classroom conversations can only go so far to help students understand the Civil Rights Movement and America's long struggle with racism and slavery. On Friday, when they were surrounded by voices singing, "We shall overcome. Deep in my heart, I do believe, we shall overcome," the Elms got to see and feel how one man moved the nation to strive to come to a better place.
Many thanks to Bob Gregory-Bjorklund for organizing and leading the event and to Rachel Geffers for preparing the Elms and Tamaracks so beautifully.
The full quotation from which the title of this entry is taken is from MLK's 1968 speech, "I Have a Dream":
"...when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:
Free at last! Free at last!/Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!
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