The 2025 theme for the NorcalMLK Foundation is Toward a More Just Union.

The framers of the U.S. Constitution made the decision to begin the document with a statement of purpose. They surmised that if there was to be a united nation, the people of the nation must come together under one federal banner — a more perfect Union — in order to do five things: 1. Establish Justice, 2. Ensure domestic tranquility, 3. Provide for the common defense, 4. Promote the general welfare, and 5. Secure the blessings of Liberty for ourselves and our posterity.

On March 31, 1968, Dr. King delivered a message at Washington D.C.’s National Cathedral entitled “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution.” There he likened the human predicament to the distinction between civilization and culture, and following sociologist Robert Morris MacIver’s distinction that civilization refers to the things we use and culture to what we are, he lamented that the nation had “allowed the means by which we live to tower above the ends for which we live.”¹

King maintained that a spark of the divine exists in each of us, and it reveals our innate individual dignity as human beings, no matter the depth of personal despair and depravity or the height of individual triumph or achievement. Our interactions with each other, in the end, must bear this one fact out: we are all connected. He states, “[a]s long as there is poverty in the world I can never be rich… As long as millions of people are inflicted with debilitating diseases,…I can never be totally healthy… Strangely enough, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be.…All of this amounts to saying that in the final analysis all life is interrelated. No nation or individual is independent; we are interdependent.”²

In the end we will all realize that the interdependency that King speaks of requires that we recognize the freedom and dignity in each another. In times of uncertainty, our complacency to the cries of the disenfranchised mark a signal of our continued immaturity as a Union. King stated it this way at San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral, “[W]e will never rise to our full maturity as a nation and we will never realize the American dream until we can remove this terrible cancer [of white supremacy and racial and economic injustice] from the Body politic. …[T]his after all is what the whole struggle is about… [I]t is at bottom a struggle to establish a reign of justice and a rule of love all over this nation and in every community.”³

In 2025 let us all move toward a more just Union and commit to strengthening the interdependent bonds that make us better human beings and a more beloved human community.

NOTES:

1. Martin Luther King, Jr., "Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution," sermon delivered at the National Cathedral, Washington, D.C., March 31, 1968, https://youtu.be/DTEPRWyIyRA?si=Rfc4SexP7TZZXB3-.

2. Ibid.

3. Martin Luther King, Jr., "The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life," sermon delivered at Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, CA, March 28, 1965, https://youtu.be/ddEQMc4neWA?si=u-xL9xQn3Qxl0-9f.