Print edition: 
This Martin Luther King Jr. Day is the first since a towering, powerful chiseled portrait of the civil rights icon took its proud place among the national memorials in Washington, D.C. Twenty-seven years in the fundraising and making, it is a historic and appropriate honor for the “black preacher with no official rank or title who somehow gave voice to our deepest dreams,” as President Obama called King at the memorial’s October dedication.
King’s likeness is now in stone in the nation’s capital, but his legacy can be best appreciated and tended in its neighborhoods, workplaces, classrooms, churches and lives.
To that end, the Greater Wichita Ministerial League will hold its annual citywide Martin Luther King Worship Celebration, “Renewing Our Mutual Promise,” at noon today at Wichita State University’s Hughes Metropolitan Complex, 5015 E. 29th St. North.
Such an event, which Sedgwick County Commission Chairman Tim Norton last week called “a great celebration of life and faith and community,” is an opportunity to measure the progress achieved in the community and country since King’s 1968 death, as well as the distance yet to go.
The nation today may be, as Obama said, “more fair and more free and more just” than when King preached to it, marched through it and sacrificed his life for it. But racism, injustice, intolerance, violence and war endure, leaving his work – and ours – undone.
As King said, in one of the 14 quotes etched along the memorial walls: “We must come to see that the end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience.”
For the editorial board, Rhonda Holman
