Mission Statement

Call and Response: Listening, Learning, and Living the Legacy
Whatever career you may choose for yourself -- Make a career of humanity. Commit yourself to the noble struggle for equal rights. You will make a greater person for yourself, a greater nation of your country, and finer world to live in.

-- Martin Luther King, Jr., "Speech Before the Youth March for Integrated Schools"

The voice and vision of Martin Luther King Jr. called a social movement into existence, but it was the courageous response of ordinary people that gave it power.

The radical social activism of King lived between call and response -- suffering people called; King listened. King called people to action; they listened. This beautiful reciprocity of call and response, witnessed in words and deeds, not only shaped King’s life, but also gave birth to and sustained the Civil Rights Movement’s moral vision for social justice.

Too often we wrongly interpret King as a lone respondent to the call for help of suffering humanity or a lone voice calling to us to create a more just society. King’s moral vision was formed in a community that embodied both call and response. In song, sermon, speech, planning, march, study, sit-in, non-violent protest, beatings, incarceration -- they listened to the call for justice and taught future generations how to respond to that call. We yet live between call and response -- inheritors of its legacy.

The Martin Luther King Jr. Commemoration Committee invites the Duke and Durham community to join in our commemoration of King and this legacy of call and response. Through a wonderful collage of events -- including a freedom school, talks, films, and performances -- we will honor this profound legacy and hold ourselves accountable to its demands.

In the setting of Durham and Duke University, where careers are being formed and fulfilled, we hope to live out Dr. King’s dictum to "make a career of humanity."