I can look out the window as I write this and see the Christmas tree, forlorn, set out by the curb. We took it down a little late this year, not out of foot-dragging sentiment but because it was a Yuletide that from beginning to end seemed to slip away.
In 1956, at a celebration at the old Statler Hotel for the 50th anniversary of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, 27-year-old Martin Luther King inspired the crowd in a speech, “The Birth of a New
The holiday season came and went too fast. It was one of those years when I felt like I never really got ahold of it. We decorated late and had some illness in the family and whatever invisible measure I set up internally that says, “This should be Christmas,” well …
It seemed like I never quite reached it, and it was over.
That is why, on the January day set aside this week to honor the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., I was thinking of both King and one of his many profound mentors, Howard Thurman.
I learned of Thurman years ago from an old friend, Phil Prehn. I had written a column regarding the Epiphany, Jan. 6, the day within the teaching of many Christian churches on which the Yuletide ends with the coming of the three kings. I wrote about my mother, raised near the tracks on Wex Avenue in Buffalo, who had been orphaned as…
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