Martin Luther King Jr Archives - Fran Moreland Johns

January 26, 2025January 26, 2025

There’s No Time for Despair

KINDNESS MUST STAND UP TO CRUELTY. AND TO SELFISHNESS AND SELF-INTEREST

(In response to two reader requests – the second prompted by Shock & Awe executive orders and repercussions in the past few days – I’m posting this essay which appeared earlier on Medium and Substack. If you’re interested in political observations, specifically re acts of kindness and how to support them, you’re invited to visit The Optimistic Eye where those are posted on Fridays.)

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Monday afternoon, January 20, 2025:

I couldn’t watch the inauguration. I’ve watched inaugurations since they were first televised, and listened to them on radio before that. Presidents I admired and presidents I opposed; mostly I wished them well.

But seeing my country inaugurate a cruel, vulgar, self-obsessed, foul-mouthed, misogynistic, vindictive convicted felon and compulsive liar who values wealth and the trappings of wealth over decency and himself over his country — it was too difficult to watch in real-time. I’ll read about it in tomorrow’s newspapers.

This was not our shining hour.

So instead, I joined a few thousand of my friends to march in celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr on the national holiday honoring him. We were in the San Francisco sunshine; other observances — prayer breakfasts, service projects, gatherings and marches — took place around the country where other thousands celebrated in cold and snow but with similar enthusiasm.

Dr. King was no saint, but he was a man of God. Our new president proclaims himself anointed by God. It felt far better, for this citizen, to be marching in celebration of the godly man than watching the self-congratulations of the man self-proclaimed to be saved by God so he could become leader of my country. I’m just not so sure about that.

Marchers came in all shapes and sizes (Author photo)

Here are the things we were marching for — in addition to the hope that justice will roll down:

Kindness. Compassion. A free press. Brotherhood. Morality. Decency. Respect. Equal protection under the law. Human rights.

And our endangered planet. It’s a little unnerving for the absolute sole authority to launch a nuclear war to be handed to a man known more for a vengeful temper than for thoughtfulness.

This is the only planet our grandchildren can inherit. No rational person could know of the floods and fires and weather events of the past year and still believe that climate change is a hoax. But the people with whom our new president surrounds himself are people who don’t believe in science and simply want to Drill Baby Drill. On his first day of shock & awe our president withdrew our country from the Paris Climate Accords. (And, inexplicably, the World Health Organization.)

Here are just a few of the organizations that will be working to preserve and protect all of the above: The American Civil Liberties Union. The Project on Government Oversight. The Center for Reproductive Rights. Ploughshares. Climate One. Take your pick, or pick another. We can all support organizations doing the work.

We can all be kind.

In the cold wind before starting the march (Author photo)

“DARKNESS CANNOT DRIVE OUT DARKNESS: ONLY LIGHT CAN DO THAT. HATE CANNOT DRIVE OUT HATE: ONLY LOVE CAN DO THAT.” — MLKJr.

Abortion/contraception/courts/Feminist Collection/General interest/Health/Healthcare/Lifestyle/Politics & Causes/Reproductive rights/San Francisco/USA/Women

February 2, 2016October 8, 2021

Women, Abortion Rights & Willie Parker

by Fran Johns

Noted physician/activist Willie Parker was in San Francisco recently explaining why he does what he does.

What Willie Parker does is regularly put his life on the line in behalf of poor women and their reproductive health. Why does he do it? “It’s the right thing to do.” Among other things Parker does is to fly regularly into Jackson, MS to provide abortions at the one remaining clinic where Mississippi women without power or resources can go for this constitutionally-protected health service.

His belief that it would be morally wrong not to help the women who come to him, Parker once told this writer, was rooted partially in a sermon Martin Luther King, Jr. preached on the good Samaritan (who stopped to help a stranger after others had passed him by.) “What made the good Samaritan ‘good’ was that instead of thinking about what might happen if he stopped to help the traveler, he thought about what would happen to the traveler if he didn’t stop. I couldn’t stop to weigh the life of a pre-viable or a lethally flawed fetus against the life of the woman sitting across from me.”

Parker headlined an event celebrating the 43^rd anniversary of Roe v Wade that was organized by Carol Joffe, PhD, of the University of California San Francisco’s Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health – and which quickly sold out.

“Most (abortion) providers keep a low profile,” Joffe said in her introductory remarks; “but Willie has chosen to be very public. (Despite his multiple degrees and honors, everybody seems to call Dr. Parker ‘Willie.’) He is building bridges to the past and to the future.” Joffe went on to speak of Parker’s connections to progressive causes, faith communities and, most recently to the Black Lives Matter movement. “What he is doing,” she said, “helps all women to live lives of dignity.”

Parker, who treats the issue of personal danger as not worth his time to worry about, calls the anti-abortion efforts “domestic terrorism,” especially with the murder of providers. The incessant efforts to overturn Roe, and passage of more and more unnecessary state laws making abortion inaccessible for women without power or resources are, he maintains, in the same “domestic terrorism” category.

So in return Parker says he tries to “radicalize” every young woman he sees in Mississippi. Since the state mandates he spend time with her, unnecessarily and repeatedly, before allowing her to have the abortion which is her constitutional right, Parker considers it only fair to put that time to best use. “I tell her, ‘these people who are trying to close this clinic – they don’t think you’re smart enough to make your own decisions.’ And I explain change will only happen if she fights for it. Then I tell her to go vote.”

All of which helps explain why Willie Parker does what he does. This writer is among the uncounted others, women and men believing in humanity and justice, who give thanks.

economics/friendships/General interest/Holidays/Lifestyle/Religion/San Francisco

January 18, 2016January 18, 2016

A Memorable MLK Day Celebration

by Fran Johns

MLK on darkness

Dr. King would, I think, have approved.

One celebration of his legacy involved a collaboration between members of a fairly mainline Presbyterian church in an affluent area of San Francisco and members of a soul-spirited Pentecostal church in the city’s Bayview community, where crime and poverty run rampant. The partnership – and friendship – between the two unlikely groups has been growing ever since its beginning in response to the mass shootings at Charleston’s Emanuel African American Methodist Episcopal Church in June of 2015.

For openers, the African American Pentecostal pastor preached (only minimally more reserved and shorter than is his custom) to the mostly white Presbyterians. His message was primarily about the Biblical admonition to welcome the alien and show hospitality to strangers. He also had a few words about justice rolling down like a river, and about Martin Luther King Jr’s assertion that love will overcome racism, materialism and militarism.

MLK Day cable car

After the service some fifty or so Presbyterians boarded motorized cable cars and sang their way across town to the Pentecostal church. There the white pastor preached to the now-multicolor congregation about the Biblical suggestion that nothing much is required of believers other than to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with the Creator. He also had a few words about some of the ads he had noticed on the trip over. Dr. King, he suggested, probably didn’t live, work and die primarily so there would be three-day mattress sales, or a 25% MLK Weekend discount on leather jackets.

During the second service, which another minister termed Presbycostal, there was a generous amount of rousing hallelujah music led by the hosts and several gospel pieces from the visitors, whose choir director and trumpet-playing musician in residence made the trip.

MLK Day Dave & choir

After the second service the hosts surprised their guests with lunch in the adjacent social hall: homemade salads, chips and dips and plates of fried chicken. A dozen or so small children, varying shades of white, brown and black, snagged their fried chicken early and set to entertaining themselves by jumping up and down a stairway below a banner that read “The Audacity to Believe.”

One of the visitors remarked to one of the hostesses, as everyone dispersed, “I think we had a lot more fun than anybody at the weekend sales.”

MLK Day lunch

California/Education/Politics & Causes/San Francisco/USA

October 25, 2015

Arne Duncan on education — and inequity, and injustice

by Fran Johns

Arne Duncan sounds like a man who is ready to get out of Washington.

At a recent Commonwealth Club of California program moderated by EdSource editor-at-large John Fensterwald, Duncan spoke briefly about educational gains made during his seven year term as U.S. Secretary of Education – but repeatedly and at length about the inequities and injustices that remain across the country. His frustration is palpable.

All those debates about Common Core, testing, over-testing? Sideline arguments. “All we can do at the federal level,” Duncan says, “is fight for equity, excellence and innovation. Take politics out of it. Figure out how to get better faster. The school-to-prison pipeline is real; suspensions and expulsions lead to crime.” And don’t even get Arne Duncan started on gun violence.

“The arc of the moral universe is long,” the Secretary quoted Martin Luther King Jr. as saying, “but it bends toward justice.”

Duncan clearly believes justice is not happening. “It doesn’t bend by itself,” he says, “or fast enough. The fight is not just about education. It’s about increasing social mobility, about keeping good jobs in our economy. From the standpoint of social justice, it’s about economics, and about keeping kids alive.”

Where is the arc not bending? “With early childhood education. The average child living in poverty starts kindergarten one year behind.” With gun violence, which Duncan repeatedly spoke of as closely tied to schools. “There have been more gun deaths since 1970 than in all of our wars combined. And there are too many instances in which the quality of education depends on where you live.”

Listing three top priorities he believes must be addressed, Duncan cites early childhood education as number one. He sees no reason why it can’t be done. “In the Netherlands, every four-year-old is in kindergarten, and they are working toward extending early childhood education to three-year-olds.” Second: “Great teachers matter. In South Korea, teachers are ‘Nation Builders.’ A teacher in North Carolina is giving blood to help pay the bills.” (Speaking of injustice and inequity.) And third: “How do we build demand for great schools, great teachers particularly in poor communities? How do we make it a badge of honor for teachers and principals to go where the need is greatest?”

Duncan cites the fact that in Massachusetts, the nation’s top state for education, 30% of all high school graduates take remedial classes to get into college. The percentage goes far higher in other states. “Do we want to keep doing that or not? And it is unbelievable to me that we don’t take action to end gun violence.”

Asked what he’d like to have as his legacy, Duncan fired back, “It’s not about me. We have a long way to go, and we must accelerate the pace of change.”

With that, Duncan stepped down from the stage. One gets the very strong impression – hearing him also say that being Secretary of Education was never something he aspired to, but he took the job because of his great admiration for Barack Obama – that he is more than happy to have stepped down from the national stage and headed back home to Chicago.

General interest

June 7, 2012

High hopes for the Class of 2012 — and hope for the planet

by Fran Johns

If it’s June, this must be graduation. A ritual ending/beginning that most of us experience once or twice in life, it offers a better than usual chance to reflect – especially if you’re lucky enough to be a past rather than current graduate.

Light years away from my own high school graduation, I’m proud and grateful to be writing this from the site of another one, specifically that of my namesake granddaughter. It is happening under the balmy sunshine of Riverdale, NY (where last year that sunshine was 100+ sweltering degrees for her brother’s ceremony) and it is offering plenty of great material for reflection. Not to mention time to do so, because for all its exceeding good works and fine education, Ethical Culture Fieldston High School is painfully slow in its handing out of diplomas. Clicking away in a back corner under the trees makes it bearable.

Speaker Vernon Jordan (grandfather of two recent Fieldston students) delivered that rarest of gifts: a commencement address that was meaningful, memorable – and brief. The civil rights legend and former member of the Clinton administration harked back to his own graduation nearly 60 years earlier from Atlanta’s segregated David Howard High School (where his classmates included Martin Luther King, Jr, New York Knicks star Walt Frazier and two-time Atlanta Mayor Maynard Jackson. Fieldston’s Class of 2012 included such recognizable names as Blankfein, Zabar and Baryshnikov.) He cited the vastly disproportionate dollars spent on white vs black students at the time, and one textbook that was a tattered cast-off from 1935. While the 2012 graduates do not bear the burdens of hardship and discrimination that faced the Howard High Class of 1953, Jordan said, they bear the burdens of responsibility, service and opportunity. He gave them three fundamentals to take on their journey:

Integrity: the inner conviction to think right, do right, be right; Do unto others as you would have them do unto you (“loving your neighbor is hard, because some of our neighbors are pretty unlovable,” but you can follow that first rule, he said); and Reach out to those who need help, reach down to pull others up. Working on that last (with the first two in mind), Jordan told the new graduates, would enable them to make the world a better place.

For those of us discouraged about the current state of the world, and dismayed by political trends toward looking out for #1(%) and ignoring those who need help, the enthusiastic acceptance of Jordan’s proposed mantle by so many members of the Class of 2012 – in Riverdale New York and elsewhere – is a bright ray of hope.

You go, grads.

General interest/Politics & Causes/USA

October 10, 2009

The Peace prize & the 20th Century

by Fran Johns

While applauding Mr. Obama, I’m among those who wish the Nobel folks had waited. I do hope peace might actually, some day, happen in the world, but given last century’s record, things are chancy at best.

My father, born in 1897, used to talk a lot about world peace. His father, born just after the end of the Civil War, lost two of his five sons to World War I, but he took comfort in the certainty that peace would abound from then on. He died in the mid-1930s, presumably not looking very closely at Germany.

My father was an eternal, though not unrealistic, optimist. The afternoon we learned that Pearl Harbor had been bombed we gathered around the Philco radio to listen to Mr. Roosevelt, and my father talked about what a terrible thing war was. But for a few years we had that one, the last ‘good’ war. There was optimism after it ended but not much peace, because we plunged right into the Cold War.

In 1953 my father — Earl Moreland was his name, he was a good guy — was president of the Virginia United Nations Association and brought Eleanor Roosevelt to Richmond to speak on — world peace. It was a plum for my fresh-out-of-college first PR job and a memorable time for me, since I got to pick up Mrs. Roosevelt at the quonset hut that passed for Richmond’s airport at the time and watch that singular lady in action. She was eloquent and reservedly hopeful. For a while in the 1950s peace seemed dimly possible, if you could look beyond SEATO and the Geneva Accords and a few issues with Communism, and ignore (as many of us did) the plight of the Palestinians.

Then came Vietnam. If that war seemed endless, which it was, at least after we made our ungraceful exit there was another tiny hope that somehow there might be a little peace… as long as you ignored the North/South Vietnam problems and weren’t looking at Israel and Palestine.

My father was a big fan of Anwar Sadat. When Jimmy Carter managed that little sit-down with Mr. Sadat and Menachem Begin at Camp David, I was visiting my father at his home a hundred or so miles south. This time we hunkered in front of the little living room TV set, and I remember my father saying “By George! I think we could see peace over there one day.” Well, we did hope. Of course, by then it was getting close to time to start looking at Afghanistan, a country many Americans (certainly including this one) thought of more as a storybook land than a real place where one bunch of people have been fighting with another bunch of people since time immemorial.

The rest is (more recent) history. It will be evident that this space is not the History Channel, but more precisely one woman’s view of the 20th century and the peace in our time that didn’t exactly happen. American Nobel peace laureates Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, George Marshall, Martin Luther King Jr., Henry Kissinger — MLK, definitely a peacemaking sort but Henry Kissinger? — and Jimmy Carter didn’t formulate much 20th century peaceable wisdom for their 21st century follower.

Barack Obama is a believer, in hope, and peace, and possibilities. I wish him well.