- Transcript -
Harris Wofford’s my name - I have been with the idea of Martin Luther King Day as a day on not a day off from the beginning. We started, John Lewis, a real civil rights hero, member of congress, and I believing that something was wrong when Martin Luther King’s Day was a day of just rest and recreation and that King, if he were around, would say my day, honoring me should be not a day of apathy but a day of action. A day not of shopping, but of service. Before long we had Coretta Scott King’s support, King Holiday Commission, that Congress should declare it as a National Day of Service and it passed overwhelmingly, Republicans and Democrats. And now a few years later, that was 1994, half a million Americans, we understand, are registered today in service. But if Martin Luther King were here he would say, “well I thought your idea was that all Americans would engage in service on this day?” And half a million is just a bit short of that, so the challenge is two fold, I think. To reach more and more people. Philadelphia, I’m told had 60,000 people registered but Philadelphia can do 3 times that. And secondly to make it deep. To go down, to put roots on this day to service all year long, not just one day. But we’re on the way. It’s a day on not a day off and the Corporation for National Service and AmeriCorps are on the front lines of the Service-Learning movement and Senior Corps and together we can take the quantum leap that we need to do. |