"A Thought To Ponder On MLK Jr. Day..."

"The Talk"

Oil on canvas

by Michael D'Antuono

More about this painting here

I would say that we have come a long, long way in our struggle to make justice a reality for all men, but we have a long, long way to go before the problem is solved. And it is this realistic position that I would like to use as the basis for our thinking together this afternoon as we think of the future of integration and as we think of progress in race relations. We have come a long, long way but we still have a long, long way to go. […]

It would be a marvelous thing if speakers all over our nation could talk about this problem in terms of a problem that once existed but that no longer has existence. But see if I stop now I will merely be stating fact and not telling the truth. You see a fact is merely the absence of contradiction but the truth is the presence of coherence. Now it is a fact that we have come a long, long way, but it isn’t the whole truth.

And in order to tell the truth, I must give the other side and if I stop at this point, I may leave you the victims of a dangerous optimism if I stop now. I may leave you the victims of an illusion wrapped in superficiality. So, in order to tell the truth, it is necessary to move on and say not only have we come a long, long way, we still have a long, long way to go before the problem of racial injustice is solved in our country. Now I need not dwell on this point. We need only turn on our televisions and open our newspapers and look around our community. We see that the problem is still with us.

– Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., March 17, 1966