WEB EXTRA: See video of Bird’s speech and King’s original speech
Click here for a recording of Liam Bird’s winning speech.
Oak Park, a town dripping with diversity, represents one of few communities that have continued to make strides towards Dr. King’s dream. We’ve continued to climb in hopes of reaching the mountaintop. We’ve continued towards the Promised Land.
This is something to be proud of because racism, this social disease, still has potentially lethal effects on the body of America. Most of the external wounds of America have healed or are healing. By that I mean that bigotry, hatred and racism are collectively rejected by most Americans on the surface. This becomes evident when you look at our school’s powerful response to the Wednesday Journal letter or on a national level to the response to the anti-semitism of Mel Gibson, or to the angry racist rant of Michael Richards.
Using that same energy, we must attack racism on a covert level because internally we are still suffering. On a covert level, racism and bigotry are still thriving as our flesh decays.
How do most of us respond? Many of us sit silently because we believe that we shall overcome someday. But we can’t wait any longer. Yes, we shall overcome someday. But let that day be today, not in 50 years. Not in 100 years. Because time will not heal our wounds. Time will not serve as a medicine or treatment to cure this disease.
Quoting Dr. King, “Our lives begin to end the moment we become silent about the things that matter.”
You think racism in this country will just disappear? Well let me tell you how it really is. Dr. King was in fact a “doctor.” In the middle of delicate surgery that he was performing, in the middle of removing the disease of racism, he was assassinated. He was taken away from the operating table on which America lay cut open. The well-meaning doctors who worked alongside Dr. King did not have the specializations needed to continue his legacy or to finish that surgery. So they closed the body back up, and for 45 years we rested!
This disease still afflicts many of us. We need to drop the word “wait” from our vocabulary. Because, my brothers and sisters, we are not “free at last”! We have not seen the Promised Land, nor have we reached the mountaintop. Freedom has not rung from every tenement and hamlet, from every city and state.
I fear, as Dr. King feared, that if we can’t live together as brothers, we will perish together as fools. If we can’t find a treatment for this disease, it will be too late!
It’s much easier to dream than to wake up to this nightmare. Freedom is not free. It requires work, courage and sacrifice. This is why a collective effort is needed today!
Let’s focus on Oak Park for a moment. Dr. King’s dream of the sons and daughters of former slaveholders and the sons and daughters of former slaves being able to sit down at a table of brotherhood is so far from reality, and I think you all know what I mean. Here at OPRF, we can’t even sit at the same lunch table. We can’t even stand on the same side of the room or sit in the same area in the fieldhouse, in the stadium, or even here in the auditorium.
Look around. Dr. King would probably be disheartened to see that after all his struggles to eradicate segregation, after being imprisoned 33 times, and after giving his life without hesitation so we could all be here together and equal, we still self-segregate. And although this allows us to remain within our comfort zones, and to escape from tension, I see this as a form of waiting. I see this as a form of comatose behavior.
And this behavior perpetuates racism and feeds this disease. Because what truly fuels prejudice or hatred is lack of communication. The communication that we engage in must change. I walk the halls of OPRF and hear biased and racist language being used. I can’t walk the halls without hearing the n-word, without hearing a fellow student being call a Jew in a derogatory fashion, or a person insulting someone by saying, “That’s so gay.” But what do we do? We either stand there in silence or laugh along uncomfortably and think, “I should have said something.”
These acts of bigotry happen at such high rates that we shrug them off as part of life. The most destructive action that an individual can take part in is Silence. In these situations we need be courageous and start speaking up! The sooner we step outside our comfort zones, the sooner we step across that color line and make ourselves vulnerable, the sooner the ignorant misconceptions and stereotypes that we all hold against one another will dissolve. And then, only then, will we be judged not by the color of our skin or shape of our eyes and noses, not by our religion or our class, our gender or our sexual orientation, our weight, our hair texture, our dialect, our clothing, or any other means of prejudice. It is at that moment when we will be judged instead by the content of our character.
Consider yourself a small clump of cells within the body of America. Small changes within your community will improve other cells. And those healthy cells will multiply. You must analyze your own behavior, your own language, your own biases and your own actions. Because we no longer have the “Doctor” for this operation or to tend to our urgent care, it will take all of us. We can change the world one person at a time. In this nation, in this region, in this state, in this community, in this school, in your class, in your group of friends, it all starts with you!
Liam Bird recently won first place in the 2007 Dr. Martin Luther King Oratory Contest at Oak Park and River Forest High School.
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Click “play” for the original, 16-minute Martin Luther King, Jr., speech. |