We'll get to that guy in due time; but first, today is Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Day.
On this holiday, I usually post a sketch I drew of King back in 1992. I drew it from a photograph that appeared in Look magazine that I particularly liked. (Look, until it folded in 1971, was a glossy, coffee-table rival magazine to Life but with Saturday Evening Post style cartoons. And now that I've explained that, I realize that as far as anyone under the age of 60 is concerned I might as well have typed that in cuneiform.)
Anyway, ten years ago, a schoolteacher saw my drawing on line and asked to use it on t-shirts he planned to give as awards to students participating in (if I remember correctly) an essay contest.
I'm not generally in the business of giving my work away for free, but this was for kids. And requested very politely by a teacher who was, I'll bet, springing for the printing cost of the t-shirts himself. So I asked only that he send me one of the shirts.
Ten years on, I still cling to a glimmer of hope that someday I'll see one of his students, on TV or on line, wearing their essay prize t-shirt. Even though this is printed on the back. Maybe it's more reasonable to think that I'd hear from some former KIPP student or their parent who remembers having the tee.
Meanwhile, here is the quotation the teacher added to my sketch:
"All this is simply to say that all life is interrelated. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in in single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly...
"I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. You can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. That is the way the world is made. I didn't make it that way, but this is the interrelated structure of reality." — Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. [Why We Can't Wait]
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