Patriot and Hero for All Americans

In preparation for my talk next month to students of Youth Leadership Foundation, who largely reside in the inner city of Washington D.C., I was presented with a challenge. Could I communicate effectively to the great, great grandchildren of slaves by discussing the mission of the Character Building Project? That is, wouldn’t it be better for me to talk about modern day African-American heroes rather than cite the philosophers from ancient Greece? It was suggested I should not discuss our Judeo-Christian heritage, nor delve into Christian principles, nor emphasize the moral beliefs of our country’s founding fathers. Finally, I should avoid discussing American exceptionalism.

I understood the need for a speaker to be relevant to his audience; but notwithstanding slavery, the War Between the States, and various forms of discrimination that surface from time to time, the United States of America, in my mind, remains the most exceptional country on earth.To not share that fact, to delete the wisdom of the ancients from my speech to the young in DC would be to commit benign neglect, to exhibit “the soft bigotry of low expectations,” so well described by former President George Walker Bush.

I have higher expectations for the rising generation who reside in DC’s inner city, and with the help of Dr. King, a hero for all Americans, I intend to make my case.

A friend, Reggie Johnson, the Headmaster at Aristoi Classical Academy in Houston, Texas came to mind as the best expert to consult in this matter.  I wrote to Headmaster Johnson because of his relevant experience with a classical curriculum in an inner city school.

I explained my dilemma:  I did not wish to appear to them as an old white guy, talking about a bunch of dead old white guys, yet should not all students should be exposed to Socrates, Aristotle, Cicero, Aquinas, Thomas More and the Founding Fathers of our country?

Reggie quickly replied…

Here are my thoughts in brief. Read Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” and his speech “I’ve Been to the Mountain Top” given in Tennessee. You can see in those that MLK himself studied the ancients–the dead white men–and he thought they were important enough to master. Also, self-deprecating, NOT self-humiliating or self-belittling humor has allowed many an old white guy to be persuasive with the audience you mention.

I have taken Headmaster Johnson’s counsel to heart not only by studying and listening again and again to several of Dr. King’s speeches. I intend to cite from the two speeches suggested by Reggie not only to remind us all of the exceptional character of Dr. King but to demonstrate that Dr. King was a learned minister steeped in our Judeo-Christian culture who, probably because of his study of the classics, loved and understood the vision and values our country’s founding fathers struggled to leave us.

Dr. King is truly a hero for all Americans, including my young audience in DC.