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Star Parker: Dusting off Dr. King’s Great Message

We celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day on the third Monday of January — this year, Jan. 17.

On Aug. 28, 1963, King delivered one of the great speeches in American history, popularly known as the “I Have a Dream” speech. It is a speech that must be dusted off and studied anew today, because it contains the very message that our nation sorely needs to hear and digest now. A message that has been tragically lost and buried and replaced with great and destructive distortions.

Two things jump out when reading through that speech.

One is how this Black preacher captured in his words that day the heart and soul of America.

Second, how King’s great message that day stands in total contrast to the rhetoric peddled by today’s progressives as the remedy to our racial strife.

The indictment of the woke movement is that America is the problem.

King offered up America as the solution.

He talked about the “magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.”

“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'”

The problem, as King explained, is not America or the eternal truths that were brought to bear in its founding.

The problem was the failure of the nation to live up to the challenges of its great founding principles.

This was the heart of King’s message that day.

He appealed to the nation to realize the dream of its founding fathers. Not to crush it and bury it, as we hear today.

The problem is not white people.

“The marvelous new militancy … must not lead us to a distrust of all white people,” he said.

And, of course, the most memorable and oft-quoted line of the speech, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

What has happened instead? Where has this great message of King gotten lost?

In the name of racial justice, our race campaigns today are defined by selection and placement based on race, based on the color of skin, and not based on the content of character, as King implored the nation to do.

King’s speech is divided into three parts.

Part one is an appeal to the nation to live up to its great founding principles.

Part two is an appeal to Black Americans to rise up and act accordingly in the noble cause of the pursuit of liberty and justice. Let’s not drink “from the cup of bitterness.”

Part three is an appeal to the ideals of the Christian soul of the nation.

He quoted the prophet Isaiah that “the crooked places will be made straight … and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.”

Biblical truths and ideals have been sadly lost to wokeism, which has for all practical purposes become a religion in itself.

Let’s honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. now, as we come out of COVID-19 and enter 2022, by revisiting and taking to heart the great truths he spoke on that summer day in Washington, D.C., 1963. Great truths that have very sadly been cast to the side and replaced with the religion of politics and power.

Let us honor King by seeing America as he presented it then, as embodying the ideals of a free nation under God.

And then we can join hands and sing, as King appealed, “the words of the old Negro spiritual: Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.”


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Star Parker

Star Parker is one of the names on the short list of national black conservative leaders. She is the founder and president of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education (CURE), a Washington D.C.-based public policy institute that promotes market-based solutions to fight poverty. Star consulted on federal Welfare Reform in the mid-90s and then founded CURE to bring new ideas to policy discussions on how to transition America's poor from government dependency. In 1996, she was a featured speaker at the 1996 Republican National Convention. Before involvement in social activism, she had seven years of first-hand experience in the grip of welfare dependency. After a Christian conversion, she changed her life. Now, Star regularly consults with both federal and state legislators on market-based strategies to fight poverty. In 2017, Star joined the White House Opportunity Initiative task force to share ideas on how to best fix our nation’s most distressed zip codes. In 2018, she was appointed to the U.S. Frederick Douglass Bicentennial Commission. Star has a bachelor's degree in Marketing and International Business from Woodbury University and has received numerous awards and commendations for her work on public policy issues. In 2016, CPAC honored her with the “Ronald Reagan Foot Soldier of the Year.” In 2017, Star was the recipient of the Groundswell Impact award, and in 2018, Bott Radio Network presented Star with its annual Queen Esther award. To date, Star Parker has spoken on more than 225 college campuses, including Harvard, Berkeley, Emory, Liberty, Franciscan, UCLA and UVA. She has authored several books; is a regular commentator on national television and radio networks including the BBC, EWTN, and FOX News; and Star is a nationally syndicated columnist with Creators, reaching 7 million readers weekly.

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