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My name is Ellen Babinski, and I have the privilege of teaching the history of Christianity here at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. Welcome to you all to this second E.C. Westervelt lecture. Our speaker today, as you know, is Leonard Pitts, and I'm delighted to see how he's packing them in.

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This is wonderful. You know that Leonard Pitts is syndicated columnist for the Miami Herald, and you know that his columns appear in newspapers across the country and, of course, here in Austin in the Austin American-Statesman. Yesterday, Mr. Pitts referred to himself as only a newspaper man.

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Well, we heard yesterday a newspaperman who is also a preacher man. We were given a glimpse of the powerful spirit which pulses through his challenging words in the newspaper. Even more, we now have a clearer sense of the particularity which Mr.

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Pitts highlights in his writing. And we also now have, with Mr. Pitts, gifts for expression. We have a sense of how he guides us, guides us all, to make the particularity he observes our own, no matter who we are.

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Today, He will ponder with us the question, a drum major for what? Join me in welcoming Leonard Pitts. Thank you, and good morning.

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Thank you for that very generous welcome, and thank all of you for your welcome as well. I recognize that we are, I think, exactly two weeks and two days beyond Martin Luther King Day. But if you will indulge me, I want to spend a few moments talking about Dr. King.

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When Pastor Wardlaw and I were discussing what I would discuss with you here today, I asked him, well, does it have to be theological? And I forget which column it was that he pointed out to me, but it was one that did not necessarily mention or reference things that you would ordinarily think of as theological, things that you would ordinarily think of as religious. And he said, well, that column was theological to me. And I said, well, if we're working with that broader parameter, then, you know, then I'm okay here.

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I can go. And I told him that I would like to talk a little bit about the life and the legacy of Dr. King, particularly because I don't think that as Americans, we truly have an understanding of what that was about. And as church people, I would argue that the life and the lessons of Dr.

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King point to what we should be doing as church people now that we are not doing. I've heard a lot of talk, very interesting talk since I've been here, on how the church relates to the other, however the other may be defined, whether the other is the other because of skin color, or the other is the other because of sexual orientation, or the other is the other because of religion, et cetera, et cetera, and I believe that the life and the legacy of Dr. King

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speak to that with a rare eloquence, if we can only evolve within ourselves ears to hear and minds to understand and hearts to really take in. So let me begin with this. Dr. King died the 4th of April, 1968.

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On that day, I was a 10-year-old boy growing up in South Central Los Angeles. I remember it was a Thursday. and I had settled down in front of the television, probably to watch Speed Racer or something, when the news came on that this man named Martin Luther King had been shot and killed. Both of my parents seemed stricken, but I did not understand.

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There used to be, you have to understand, there used to be this group of singers, some of you may recall them, a group of singers called the King Family. They did holiday specials on television, on Hollywood Palace, I believe was a TV show. The King family, for any of those of you who ever had to endure them, were more white bread than a bakery. They made Lawrence, and I apologize to any of their fans who are in attendance, but for my young ears, they made Lawrence Welk sound like James Brown by comparison.

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And I despised them with a healthy passion. So when I heard that this Martin Luther King person had been... killed, I assumed that he was a member of that group. And I wondered out loud why anybody would be so sad to see one of them go.

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My parents suggested rather forcefully that I should leave the room for the sake of my own health. I was a child living in my childish world that barely touched the bigger world where grown folks lived. And frankly, I cared a heck of a lot more about Marvel Comics and Speed Racer cartoons than I did about civil rights.

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So I did not know why people were upset. I did not know why they seemed so lost. I did not know who this Martin Luther King person was. I would argue that 39 years later, many of us still do not.

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39 years after the assassin's bullet, tore into the right side of his face and exploded in his chest 39 years after he crumpled to the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, nearly four decades after the movement that he led sputtered to an end. Much of the nation worships a cardboard cutout that it calls Martin Luther King, while the Baptist preacher who lived and breathed and bled under that name for 39 years goes anonymous, unremarked, and unknown. Even though we've had a day set aside in his honor for 21 years now, even though we invoke his name and quote his speeches and name streets in his honor, even though we have, for my money, made him less an inspiration than an image trapped in yesterday, frozen forever in black and white newsreel footage, saying over and over again, I have a dream, I have a dream, I have a dream, I have a dream.

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As if he never said anything else. As if he never said, non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. So do to us what you will, and we will still love you. As if he never said, truth, crushed to earth, will rise again.

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As if he never said, we must learn to live together as brothers, and perish or perish together as fools. And as if he never said, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for peace. And he did not mean a someday peace.

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He did not mean an eventual one day peace. He meant peace in this day. He meant peace in the here and the now. For as much as we like to think about him and speak of him as

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the dreamer, this philosopher of a promised land to be realized someday in the suite by and by, there was an impatience in Martin Luther King Jr. There was an unwillingness to wait. There was a frustration with status quo. There was a refusal to believe that a thing must always be simply because a thing has always been.

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Nowhere is that illustrated quite as vividly as in a long and justifiably famous passage from his letter from a Birmingham jail, which was written in response to a statement from a group of white clergymen who were chastising the Negroes for their refusal to wait patiently for their citizenship rights to be granted to them. In this long passage, Dr. King wrote, quote, For years now, I have heard the word wait. It rings in the ear of every Negro with a piercing familiarity.

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This wait has almost always meant never. We must come to see with the distinguished jurist of yesterday that justice too long delayed is justice denied. We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jet-like speed toward the goal of political independence, and we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward the gaining of a cup of coffee at a lunch counter.

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I guess it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, wait. But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will, and drown your sisters and brothers at whim, when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize, and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity, when you see the vast majority of your 20 million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society, when you suddenly find your tongue twisted, and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Fun Town is closed to colored children and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mirror.

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sky and see her begin to distort her little personality by unconsciously developing a bitterness toward white people. When you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son asking in agonizing pathos, Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean? When you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you. When you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading white and colored, when your first name becomes, your middle name becomes boy, however old you are, and your last name becomes John, and your wife and mother are never given the respected title of Mrs. When you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and plagued with inner fears and outer resentments, when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of nobodiness, then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. So we're not talking about a man of infinite patience. And when he spoke of reaching the promised land, when he spoke of being a drum major for peace, a drum major for justice, he did not mean some airy-fairy abstract. He did not mean something that would come to us in some far distant day. Rather, he meant something real, something touchable and tangible, something we could work toward and bring into existence. He meant justice now. He meant brotherhood now. He meant housing

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Now. He meant ending hunger. Now. He meant alleviating poverty. Now. He meant nations and people finding ways of resolving conflict that did not involve guns and blood. Now. And I know it sounds utopian, sounds like something that could never happen because, you know, the world just doesn't work that way. It sounds impossible. I think many of us have brought into the idea that these things, that changing the world, is impossible. I would only say that these things are as impossible, perhaps, as believing that a woman, a member of the largest group of second-class citizens on Earth, heir to centuries of violence and repression, legal property of men in countless cultures, that a woman could someday become chief diplomat of the mightiest nation on Earth. I would only say that it is as impossible as believing that a Jew, and I was with this man when this happened, that a Jew could be beaten bloody, starved, skeletal, cursed, reviled, and spat upon, and then return 60 years later and dance in the place where he almost died. I would only say that it is as impossible as believing that the grandchildren of slaves might someday fly spaceships to the stars. You see, sometimes impossible is just a word that we use for things that we have not yet figured out how to do. I think that one of the most depressing and distressing changes that has come upon us as church people and as a nation in the 40 years since the Civil Rights era is that we have come to accept that so many things are impossible. We have come to accept that so many things

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are, always have been, and must always be. And that, to me, is a denial of faith. It is a denial of our ability to make change. It is a denial of God's ability to make change. Martin Luther King believed that the promised land was just one of those things we had not yet figured out how to do. It was a faith to which he dedicated his life. Now we can wax rhapsodic about the words that he spoke, I have a dream, and children can write their reports for school every January, and yet no one ever talks too deeply about what that dream was or why it shook the thrones of power and inspired the shantytowns of poverty, why it terrified some and it lifted others, and why it mattered and matters still even today. I saw an article once where they asked some kids what it was that Martin Luther King did that was so important that some of the kids thought that he freed the slaves. I was browsing at a black bookstore in Miami, Afro in Books, and I found myself talking to this young black woman about Dr. King, and she told me he didn't mean too much to her because he thought that he was too soft, quote, unquote. But I'll tell you the truth. You know, I have a job writing for a major American newspaper because of Martin Luther King, Jr. You and I are able to be here today together because of Martin Luther King, Jr. Oprah Winfrey has her talk show. Michael Jordan played at the highest levels of basketball. Colin Powell was the Secretary of State. Condoleezza Rice is the Secretary of State because of Martin Luther King, Jr. And it occurs to me that the least that we can do for him

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In gratitude is also the least that we can do for ourselves in self-interest, which is to spend a little time understanding who he was and how he did what he did and how we can apply those. lessons to the challenges of our lives and our churches today. Because contrary to what some people wish and others fervently claim, racial inequity, inequity period, did not end when the Civil Rights Movement did. Indeed, it seems like every day there's some new study or revelation which illustrates what wishful thinking that really is. Like, for instance, The Georgetown University study, which indicated that white doctors are less likely, significantly less likely, to order aggressive medical treatment when their patients are African-American. Or like the New Jersey Attorney General, who admitted that state troopers are more likely, significantly more likely, to pull drivers over if the drivers are black. Like the Agriculture Department, the USDA, which admitted a few years ago that it has for years systematically denied loans to certain farmers because they were black. The African-American farmer is now pretty much extinct in this country. I believe there are 200 or less in this country. Like the study which came out just a couple of years ago, which said that a black person is six times more likely to be locked up than a white one, even when they commit the same crime, even when they have identical criminal histories.

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and so on and so on. A seemingly endless litany of slights and wrongs that codifies the simple fact that we didn't quite reach the promised land of which Dr. King spoke on the last night of his life. We have come so far and yet we still have so far to go. Which is why it is important to me that we return to the man who got us this far and to drop the cardboard cutout that we have instituted in his place to exchange the image for the inspiration to understand how he did, what he did and how he did it so that we can take the lessons of his example and use it to change the lives of our children and ourselves in the here and now. In order to understand the man, you have to understand where he came from. In order to understand where he came from, you have to understand a little bit of history. So with your indulgence, let me give you a brief history lesson. For some of you, this will be a reminder, some of you are young enough that it will probably be fresh news. Everybody knows that black folks were freed from slavery when the Civil War ended in 1865. Not everyone, and Abraham Lincoln was the one who wrote the Emancipation Proclamation, by the way. Let's get that out there. Not everyone knows what happened afterward. There was a period of a few years when the South experimented with what one historian described as a revolutionary concept that had never before been tried in America. It was called democracy. With federal troops occupying the South, black people enjoyed a level of freedom they never had seen before. They held public office, they voted, they rode on streetcars, they went to schools, they served on juries, and they were treated more or less like people.

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So you knew that it could not last. The change began with rioters who rode through the night in packs with hoods on their faces, torches in their fists, terrorizing, beating, and brutalizing black people who were foolish enough to act like people. These groups went by many names. There was the Knights of the White Camellia. There was Mother's Little Helpers. And there was, most infamously of all, the Ku Klux Klan. Their mission was simple. It was to drive black people off of the streetcar, out of the schoolhouse, away from the jury box, out of public office, and most crucially, away from the voting booth. There were even times when black folks went to vote in the South and found cannon waiting for them. After the election of 1876, it got worse. That election ended in the kind of stalemate that we became very familiar with in the year 2000. There were charges of vote fraud and contested results in Florida, not to mention Louisiana and South Carolina, but Florida was right in there. According to historian Lerone Bennett Jr., they settled the confusion not by going to the Supreme Court, but by a meeting behind closed doors in which representatives for the two candidates hammered out a compromise. Rutherford B. Hayes would become the President of the United States if he agreed to withdraw from the South the federal troops who had been stationed there to protect African-American rights. When Hayes took office, he did exactly that. By 1895,

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It was all over but the crying. That was the year an octoroon man, that's, for those of you not familiar with the old language of race in this country, that means he was one-eighth black. This man came before the Supreme Court because he had disobeyed a train conductor who told him to move from the colored section, I'm sorry, to move to the colored section of the train. This man, Homer Plessy, was white to all physical intents and purposes. Homer Plessy is said to have looked about as much like a black man as Brad Pitt does. But the court still found in favor of the train conductor, John Ferguson, I believe was his name, who asked him to move. In the case of Homer of Plessy versus Ferguson, it handed down a ruling that upheld the concept of separate but equal. And that ruling was the birth certificate of something they used to call Jim Crow. By the time Martin Luther King Jr.

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was born 34 years later, Jim Crow ruled the South. Jim Crow mandated that black people were to be kept separate from white ones from the beginning of life until the end. They could not, literally, they could not be born in the same hospital nor buried in the same cemetery. And in the years in between, they could not live in the same neighborhood, walk in the same park, worship at the same church,

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use the same public facilities, swim in the same pool, sit on the same bus seat, drink water from the same fountain. There used to be a soda pop machine on an army base in the south, a military base in the south, that had two slots. One for white money, the other for colored. During the Second World War, the American Red Cross made it an official policy to segregate the black blood from white blood.

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Having never been in war, I can't say this for a fact, but I think that if I was grievously wounded and needed blood, I wouldn't much care who it came from. If it was donkey blood and it would work, I would take it, but that's just me. One of my favorites, the city of Birmingham, used to have a law on the books where a black man and a white man could go to jail if they committed the crime of playing checkers together.

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This was called separate but equal, but separate was hardly ever equal. The water fountain for the black people was corroded and rusty. The bathroom was nasty enough to turn your stomach. The cemetery was overgrown with weeds.

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The school had to make do with old books thrown out by white kids. And there was more. You did not, if you were black, hold your head up when you were talking to a white person. You entered their homes by the back door.

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They entered yours by the front. They called you boy and gal and you people and. You called them sir and ma'am and boss and captain. And you never got out of line, never acted like you wanted to get an education, wanted to vote, wanted to make something of yourself in this world.

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Because if you did, you might lose your job or somebody might blow up your house. You might get beaten up or shot at. You might get strung up to a tree and burned alive and have pieces of your body sold as souvenirs. So you can see how living that way would affect you.

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Maybe make it hard to get a good job and a decent education. Yes, make it difficult to get ahead. But what you can't see as easily, perhaps, is how it might affect you inside. I heard Mr.

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March say here yesterday that it's difficult for him as a white man to put himself into those shoes. And I would only ask, use your imagination, what must it be like to go out into the world every day and everything that you see, everything that you do, reminds you that you are, in the official opinion of your government, inferior, second best, not good enough. You live like that for a while, and it gets hard to hold your head up.

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It gets hard to think of yourself as a woman or a man. So here's the question that this church man faced, that Martin Luther King faced when he began his career of civil disobedience in 1955. What are you going to do about it? Church, what are you going to do about it?

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As someone who was coming of age right when Jim Crow was coming to an end, I know what I like to think I'd have done about it. Same thing a lot of us like to think we'd have done about it. We look back on those days, and it's hard to fathom that people ever really lived like that here in America. And we say to ourselves, I could not have done it.

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No way I would have put up with that. I'd have gotten me a gun and shot somebody. I'd have hit somebody. They would not have done that to me.

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It's brave talk, but it's only brave talk, because the fact of the matter is, if it were you, probably would have done the same thing they did. I probably would have done the same thing they did. Swallow pride, learn to hide anger behind a smile, cover resentment over with a loud laugh. What else can you do?

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If you pick up that gun, you die in the spot where you stand. You die and nothing changes. So how can you fight this thing? Church man, 26-year-old church man, Dr.

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King, what are you going to do about it? Here is the answer to which Martin Luther King led a generation. We will not cooperate, he said. Remember, non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as cooperation with good.

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So do to us what you will, and we will still love you. Love thine enemy. That's the part that a lot of us have a hard time understanding.

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It makes some people get real teary-eyed, and they want to sing songs of brotherhood and martyrdom and kumbaya. And it makes others impatient with something that they perceive as soft. Both those perceptions miss the point. This was angry love.

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This was militant love. This was revolutionary love. This was love that dared to look at the Christian gospels and to believe that the message there applied not just to the misty past or the sweet by-and-by. but to this minute, this day, right here, right now.

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This was love that refused to cooperate. This was love that would not fight with bullets and fists, but at the same time, that would not give in. So in the end, this was love that made people walk wherever they had to go for 381 days in Montgomery, Alabama, rather than ride Jim Crow's buses. It was love that stood on a bridge in Selma, Alabama, defying state troopers rather than accept Jim Crow's laws.

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It was love that confronted snarling police dogs and firemen with high-pressure hoses shooting out the water with enough force to strip the bark from the trees rather than shop in Jim Crow's stores. This was love that had its head busted open, its bones split, its teeth broken, its eyes blackened. Then this love went up, got up, and went back for more. This was love that drew the sympathetic eyes of a watching world that woke the sleeping conscience of the nation so that movie stars and middle-class white kids and housewives soon found themselves compelled to travel south and lend their voices to the struggle.

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And in the end, this was love that killed Jim Crow dead. Love that opened up the school and the park and the library, the voting place, the coffee shop, the job. Love that made it possible for black folks and white women to play checkers together, if they so wished, right on the front steps of Birmingham City Hall. In February of 1968, just two months before he died, Martin Luther King gave a sermon.

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The text was the verse in the Gospels where two of his disciples are asking where two of the disciples are asking Jesus essentially to guarantee them the best seats in heaven. When we get there, I want to be on your right hand and I want to be on your left. And Jesus says, as I recall, that, you know, this is not, you don't know what you're asking.

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This is not mine to grant. King called that, he identified that as the drum major instinct, meaning the desire to lead the parade, the desire to be out in front, the desire to be important. But too often, he said, we want to be important for all the wrong reasons. The inevitability of his own death pressed heavily on Dr.

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King in those days. Much of the country resented the changes he had made. Threats of violence were nonstop. So perhaps it is not surprising that his talk of the drum major turned into kind of a eulogy for himself.

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If any of you are around when I have to meet my day, he said, I don't want a long funeral. And if you get somebody to deliver the eulogy, tell him not to talk too long. Don't talk about the fact that he had a Nobel Peace Prize, he said. Don't talk about any of his other awards.

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Don't talk about where he went to school. None of that, he said, was important. I'd like for somebody to mention that day that Martin Luther King, Jr. tried to give his life serving others.

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I'd like for somebody to say that day that Martin Luther King, Jr. tried to love somebody. And he went on to say, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace.

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Say that I was a drum major for righteousness, and all of the other shallow things will not matter. And two months later, this was February of 1968, two months later, that bullet plowed into his right cheek, and he crumpled on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. And now here we sit, nearly 40 years later, come so far, and yet still so far to go. We have come to live in a dreamless time.

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We are painfully hip, bloated with attitude, too cool for school. We fail to feel, and when somebody tells us something is impossible, we believe it. I have a dream, says the old newsreel clip. I have a dream, I have a dream, I have a dream.

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And we roll our eyes maybe because we've seen it all a million times before, or maybe we don't even listen because we've heard it a million times before. And in the meantime, in this day, in this age, children go to school with guns in their backpacks. to protect themselves from other children in school with guns in their backpacks. And in the meantime, police will still pull you over in certain neighborhoods for driving too nice a car in too nice a neighborhood.

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And in the meantime, all around us, empty stomachs, empty spirits, empty minds, empty hearts, and hate. And in the meantime, the headlines are filled with genocide. 60 years after the Holocaust, genocide and war. And in the meantime, Matthew Shepard and James Byrd remain dead at this hour, one dead for being gay, the other dead for being black.

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Church, we face the same question that Dr. King faced when his career began in 1955. What are you going to do about it? You see it.

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It's right there. What you going to do? We have become drum majors for all the wrong things. as an American society.

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We have become drum majors for cynicism, drum majors for selfishness, drum majors for smallness of mind and coldness of heart, drum majors for indifference and apathy and a refusal to understand that impossible is just a word for things we haven't yet figured out. out how to do. Drum majors, our children are drum majors for BET and MTV. Drum majors for all the wrong things.

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As churches, as people, we should be exhorting anyone who will listen to become drum majors for a higher cause. Be a drum major for affordable housing. by working to erect roofs and walls and backyards that give a man or a woman, perhaps for the first time in his or her life, the pride of ownership and that free children to play in places where drugs and women's bodies are not being sold. Be a drum major for justice.

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Make some noise. Refuse to agree by your silence with unwritten policies that allow police to detain and arrest and judges to punish and imprison based on nothing more substantial than color of skin. Be a drum major for women by pushing your government to take a stand to say something instead of standing silent when Pakistan sentences a woman to be gang raped for a crime that her brother is alleged to have committed. Be a drum major for women when families in Southeast Asia are selling their little girls to brothels.

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Be a drum major for truth by refusing to allow politicians of both the left and the right to define morality in the narrow terms that they prefer, abortion and gay rights. Point out to them that morality also has to do with how you treat the poor. the uneducated, the underprivileged, and undervalued of a society. Tell them that there is nothing moral about demonizing and stigmatizing those who are least able to respond, nothing moral about cutting services to people who live on the bottom, nothing hunger about watching a child hunger and doing nothing about it.

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There are a million ways to be a drum major. There are a million ways to beat a righteous drum. The thing is, it's less important what you do than that you do. Let me tell you a quick story.

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Three, no, four years ago, I guess it is, I went to Africa for the first time. And one day I walked through Kru Bay, which is a shantytown in Freetown, the capital city of Sierra Leone. You have to understand that Sierra Leone is, by some United Nations measures, the poorest city of the poorest nation on Earth. So I'm in the slum of the capital city of the poorest nation on Earth.

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Crew Bay is the worst place that I've ever been in my life. It is a place where the people were lean and ragged and living in filth. It was a place where there was a stream filled with gray water and garbage meandering right through. There were pigs wandering about, and there was a dog with open sores lying in the dirt.

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In Crew Bay, I met a woman named Kadiatu Sisay. She was what they call a petty trader, meaning someone who sets up a table in front of her shanty and sells small commodities, rice and palm oil, things like that, in plastic bags. She makes about 4,000 leons a day. The leon is one of the most worthless currencies on earth, so 4,000 leons a day translates to about $1.65 U.S.

00:36:15.600 - 00:36:32.160

Her husband earned about the same. They have four children, four girls, the oldest was 13, 14 when I visited them. Kadiatu Sisay told me her dream is to send her children to college. I want to read you part of what she told me, what she said to me.

00:36:33.440 - 00:36:56.400

She said, quote, In Sierra Leone now, we the women, we are the men, because we can do more than our husbands can, we the women. Now, my husband have no job, so I am the husband and the wife. And as she said this, her husband is sitting right, not even that far, right there, her husband is sitting right there. She says, we, the grassroot people, we want help.

00:36:56.400 - 00:37:07.520

We need help from you. And when she said this, she's looking at me, and suddenly it's not theoretical anymore. When she says, we need help from you, it's not somebody else someplace else. It's me sitting there in that shanty with her.

00:37:07.920 - 00:37:23.440

She said that there is a belief that reporters come from America, and there were several people who just didn't want to be bothered with me. as an American reporter, she said, there's a belief that reporters come from America. We see the wretchedness of this place. We take our notes, we do our stories, but we find it funny.

00:37:23.440 - 00:37:32.140

We sneaker behind our hands. They take, quote, they take their pictures and laugh at at them, you see. So now I've given you my name, so I want you to take this deep into your heart.

00:37:32.380 - 00:37:44.700

I want you people to help me, me and my children. I asked her if she really believes that people in America would laugh at her plight. That is what people are saying, she said. When they go, they will just forget about us.

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They will not help us. So now we want to get them to help us. We need your help. It's very, very hard for us.

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What you going to do? When I got back from Sierra Leone, I could not stop thinking about that encounter. And I met a lot of poor people in a lot of very bad situations, but that particular encounter stayed with me. I did a little research online.

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You know how much it costs to send a child to college in Sierra Leone? Pora Bay College was established by the British in the 1800s. It's regarded as one of, if not the best institutions of higher learning in West Africa. A year's tuition costs roughly $700, $750, probably more with books and expenses.

00:38:26.380 - 00:38:44.860

I spend that much every year on cable. So last year, I went back to Krube, and I found Kadiatu Sisse, and I told her that I was going to pay to educate her oldest child. I am careful not to make more out of it than it is. I can't save Africa.

00:38:45.340 - 00:39:01.460

And one of the things that you learn when you are there is that you cannot fill every hand that reaches out to you. There's literally no way to do it. But I also know that maybe I can be a drum major for one African girl. And maybe she will grow up to change lives beyond that.

00:39:01.460 - 00:39:45.580

And that maybe if more of us did that in our ways, big, institutional and small individual, if more of us did that, resolved to do what we can where we are now, if more of us understood that impossible is just a word for things we use for things we haven't figured out how to do yet, then maybe we could change Africa, and Pakistan, and Afghanistan, and Alabama, and South Central Los Angeles, and maybe even Austin, Texas. At the very least, I feel that we are obligated by the burdensome gift of humanity itself, and by the uncountable blessings of our lives, and by the God that we profess to believe in and to serve, to try.

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Now, I understand that this is a crazy idea, but I also know that sometimes crazy ideas are the only ones worth following. Dr. King had this crazy idea that the walls between black and white, high and rugged, centuries old and maintained by the forces of law and custom could be made to crumble if only enough people were willing to be drum majors for justice, drum majors for righteousness, and that we would not have to wait for some utopian future to see it happen.

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In this day, he said, in this day, now is the time. Now is the time. 40 years later, here we sit, you and I. We are not perfect.

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We are not finished. We are not done. not by a long shot. Yet still we sit here in a place that once, in a condition that once would have been deemed impossible.

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So I ask you, where is your drum? And what cause are you beating it for? Thank you very much. Thank you, Leonard Pitts.

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May the day come, today, when we begin to dream and to find those dreams possible. Thank you for giving us your voice, Leonard Pitts. Thank you. Now we have a little bit of time.

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We have time about 15 minutes before the next lecture, okay? So get yourselves stretched, move around, and we will begin promptly at 11:15.