What's your cause?

"I want you to say that I tried to love and serve humanity...say that I was a drum major for justice; say that I was a drum major for peace; I was a drum major for righteousness...I just want to leave a committed life behind."
--Martin Luther King, jr.

In honor of the holiday today which commemorates the life and contribution of Martin Luther King, jr. I want to say a few things about this man that I deeply admire. I have a degree in history & while earning that degree there was no one else that impacted me in the same way he did.

• He became a leader in the Montgomery bus boycott that started in Dec. 1955. After Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man in the black section of the bus, a boycott was declared. It lasted over a year & eventually cost the city $250,000.
  
• On Jan. 30, 1956 his house was bombed. The mobs that gathered were angry and ready to attack. He said, "We cannot solve this problem with retaliatory violence...We must meet hate with love."
• In Sept. 1958 a white woman stabbed him near fatally by his heart. He refused to press charges.
• He conditioned himself to get by on only 4 hours of sleep to keep up with the demand to write, study, prepare speeches and travel around the globe.
• He helped organize a protest in Birmingham, Alabama where 2500 students (high school & elementary) walked the streets. Many were taken down with fire hoses by the local authorities so stop the demonstration.
• In 1963 he delivered his famous "I have a Dream" speech to a quarter of a million people in front of the Lincoln memorial.
• He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. In his acceptance speech he said, "nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral question of our time...the foundation of such a method is love."
• He was assasinated in Memphis, TN on April 4, 1968
  

Upon reviewing a few of the facts from his life, it makes me wonder what cause I'd support in the same way. What would I be willing to go to jail for? What would I be willing to sit at a lunch counter for and get mocked, food thrown on me and yelled at? Very little, sadly enough, but I'd fight to the death for my family. Isn't it interesting that I'll probably never be asked to go to jail or march on washington for them, but do my actions each day correlate with that conviction? I hope so. Although MLK, jr. changed millions of lives through his philosophy of meeting hate with love, I have a chance to change a few by the same token.

{Source: King:The Photobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. by Charles Johnson & Bob Adelman}