President Crawford's Martin Luther King Day Message

Posted on Monday, January 20, 2025

Dear Texas Southern University Family,

Today, the nation celebrates the life and enduring substantive legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Dr. King’s life is an extraordinary story of the profound power of faith, persistence, resilience, and sacrifice. As the “Drum Major of Justice,” he remains without peer. His commitment to service stands alongside the great figures of U.S. and world history. However, as often is the case with historical mission-driven figures of great personal fortitude and character, today Dr. King is viewed through a sanitized and mostly vanilla lens. It is critically important that we remember Dr. King as the radical agent of change he absolutely was. He was arrested and jailed twenty-nine times for acts of civil disobedience. He willingly endured the risks an incarcerated Black man faced in the South during the 1960s to cast a light on injustice. Dr. King railed against the status quo, challenged authority, and called upon elected officials across this country, at the State and federal levels, to do the right thing. All in the hope of attaining what he called the Beloved Community.

As insidious as poverty, the denial of equal housing, employment inequity, and racism are the eradication of these evils was merely a component of Dr. King’s dream for humanity. The dream he preached from the steps of the Lincoln Monument in August 1963. From the first moment he strode onto the public stage in the Montgomery bus boycott, “reconciliation…redemption, the creation of the Beloved Community” was his objective. His fight against segregation was not the pursuit of desegregation, but the quest for integration, and not integration in the Webster dictionary sense, but a deep inclusive positive change of the human spirit. Dr. King told us that desegregation is the imposition of law, he sought a change in the human heart – the positive acceptance and welcomed equal participation of all. He once said, “Desegregation is a society where men are physically desegregated and spiritually segregated, where elbows are together, but hearts are apart…it leaves us with a stagnant equality of sameness rather than a constructive equality of oneness.” Dr. King sacrificed his life for this dream. A dream he understood he would not see in his lifetime, but a vision he prayed we as a nation would one day embrace. Although brought closer by Dr. King’s nonviolent militancy, that day is yet to come.

Students of Texas Southern University, from the first day of my arrival I have asked you to seriously contemplate why you are here. I have suggested your task here at this institution is to hone your skills, acquire knowledge, and refine your character to equip you to pursue lives of accomplishment and purpose. Certainly, “accomplishment and purpose” can be defined in many different ways, including building the intellectual capacity to attain career success, contributing to economic development, opening pathways to defeat poverty, addressing housing deficiencies, joblessness, and baseless inequity. All of these are truly valuable societal goods worthy of your dogged pursuit. However, the realization of Dr. King’s Beloved Community asks you to think beyond these discreet societal goods to pursue the larger goal of a oneness of humanity reflected in his observation that, “we are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality."

This is not a Black thing, the Beloved Community transcends race, creed, and color. We are all heirs of the bequest left by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Short though it may have been, the timeless message of his well-lived life, calls us to be a radical for our time as he was for his. The question presented to us on January 20, 2025, is how we contribute to the radical change that will move us as a nation and humanity more broadly closer to the Beloved Community. An easy first step for each individual here in Texas Southern is to commit to bringing the positive constructive oneness Dr. King preached to our university community to serve as an exemplar to be emulated by all

Category: Alumni, News Media, Faculty & Staff, Students