When asked who my hero is during random gatherings, I used to say Henry Ford, because I always liked how he influenced society with his inventions and systems, allowing people of all types to have an opportunity to grow financially through hard work, but as I studied him more and more, I realized he was not very open minded.

Last year, I decided to change my hero is Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He was a man with strong vision, strong convictions and strength of character to lead a revolution into the truth. We are all brothers and sisters no matter our skin color or financial status.

Here is a fine discourse he gave many years ago that we could really use today.

Let me say finally, that in the midst of the hollering and in the midst of the discourtesy tonight, we got to come to see that however much we dislike it, the destinies of white and black America are tied together. Now the races don’t understand this apparently. But our destinies are tied together. And somehow, we must all learn to live together as brothers in this country or we’re all going to perish together as fools.

…Whether we like it or not culturally and otherwise, every white person is a little bit negro and every negro is a little bit white. Our language, our music, our material prosperity and even our food are an amalgam of black and white, so there can be no separate black path to power and fulfillment that does not intersect white routes and there can ultimately be no separate white path to power and fulfillment short of social disaster without recognizing the necessity of sharing that power with black aspirations for freedom and human dignity.
~Martin Luther King, Jr.
in one of his last speeches, given at Grosse Point, Michigan high school (near Detroit) to a mostly white and often heckling audience, March 14, 1968

Thank you for being the voice of sanity Dr. King. May your ideas and your conviction live on, uniting our divided nation as one in service to each other and our creator.