King feared the silence of unraised voices

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Recently, the two of us sat down after a long day and looked for a good movie on one of our seemingly ever-growing list of streaming service providers. We opted for an older movie that we both knew to be good, but which we hadn't watched in decades. It was "Driving Miss Daisy" starring Jessica Tandy and Morgan Freeman. An inspired choice, it turned out.

A scene near the end of the film contained a powerful message that had somehow eluded our younger minds and hearts in early 1990. Miss Daisy (Tandy) has been driven by her chauffeur, Hoke Colburn (Freeman), to a downtown Atlanta hotel to attend a speech by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Shamefully, Miss Daisy — who by this point in the movie has befriended Hoke — does not invite him to join her at her table because he is Black. The South is still largely segregated at the time depicted and she is fearful of losing her social standing among white peers.

Although the movie is fiction, King did, in fact, deliver his Nobel Prize recognition speech at the Dinkler Plaza Hotel on Jan. 27, 1965. In the scene, the viewer does not see King but does hear a real recording of his speech. (An abbreviated version is on YouTube.)

Two sentences, delivered with King's prophetic and melodious voice, seemed to reach beyond time to pierce our hearts:

"History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the vitriolic words and violent actions of the bad people, but the appalling silence and indifference of the good people. Our generation will have to repent not only for the words and acts of the children of darkness but also for the fears and apathy of the children of light."

We remain in a period of painful social transition. Race relations remain far from perfect, political polarization and intolerance to ideas different from our own seem to be rapidly growing, and injustices against our fellow human beings — as well as Mother Earth — scream relentlessly from media of all kinds.

Our hope and prayer this Martin Luther King Jr. Day is that those of us who consider ourselves good people first acknowledge our own silence and indifference to the sufferings of others and then actively work to confront and overcome our fear and apathy.

As King stated, there remain millions of people "whose voices are yet unheard, whose course is yet unclear, and whose courageous acts are yet unseen."

There is, perhaps, no better way to honor the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. than by striving to truly become worthy of the moniker "children of light" and embracing his call to action to fight against all prejudice and injustice with our hands, hearts, voices and souls and with courage, nonviolent peaceful resistance and love.

Jack and Cindy Uldrich live in Minneapolis.