DIOCESAN NEWS
01/19/07
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Diocesan events, anniversaries fill 2006
     JACKSON — Two things caught the attention of Alex Tillmon, 14, during the 2007 annual program celebrating Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday held in St. Peter the Apostle Cathedral Sunday, Jan. 14.
     “It was pretty good,” said Tillmon, who traveled from Tchula with his two sisters, Shamira and Dominique, and Franciscan Sisters Beverly Weidner, Loretta Beyer and Louise McKigney.
     “I liked hearing about Dr. Jones and the Piney Woods school. It was interesting,” he said. “Also about how important it is to remember the history about Piney Woods. I thought it was a very serious theme — that if people don’t start looking at what we are supposed to be doing today and paying attention to black history, we might all perish, not only blacks, but all the different cultures.”
     Maxine Ford of Greenwood St. Francis of Assisi Parish, came to the annual celebration with her daughter and three grandchildren.
     “I like Tom Head’s presentation on being dissatisfied about certain actions taken, as well as those actions not taken, which could benefit everyone here in the state of Mississippi,” said Ford. “Like everybody there said, we all need to be visionaries in order to make things better here,” she said.
     Tillmon and Ford were among the over 100 people of various religious denominations, religions and ethnicities who attended the celebration hosted by Bishop Joseph Latino of the Diocese of Jackson.
     “Lift Every Voice: Breaking Barriers to Understanding” was the theme of this year’s program honoring Dr. King.
     The keynote speaker was Rev. Jacqueline Luck, minister of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Jackson. The title of her presentation was “Without Vision the People Will Perish.”
     Rev. Luck used the occasion to “uplift another black visionary,” Dr. Lawrence Clifton Jones, founder and president of the Piney Woods Countrylife School in Piney Woods, Miss., located 50 miles south of Jackson.
     Rev. Luck related the history of Piney Woods and the role it played from 1909 in uplifting and educating the “head, heart and hands” of countless black rural Mississippi students up through today, as it continues to educate students from all over the United States and many foreign countries.
     Today, Rev. Luck said, Mississippi needs more visionaries like Dr. Jones. “Today we are honoring history, but today you and I are living tomorrow’s history. We need to be visionaries,” she said, to bring Dr. King’s dream to fruition.
     Mississippi needs visionaries as its wrestles with dismal statistics in the areas of children’s health care, infant mortality rate, juvenile justice, poverty, the death penalty and ignorance, said Rev. Luck.
     “Mississippi is the most dangerous place in the United States for women and children,” she said, “. . . How can we not commit to do what we can?”
     In closing the celebration, Bishop Latino told the audience that in order to be a visionary, one has to see what others can not, or refuse to see.
     “Jesus tells us when you do for the least of your brothers, you do for me,” he said. “But when you suffer from the ‘I disease’,” he said, pointing to his heart, “you can’t even see the needs of our brothers.” People continue to make attractive rationalizations about segregation and other sins, he said.
     “Dr. Martin Luther King did not suffer from ‘I disease.’ That is why we are celebrating him here today.”

     Famous quotes of Dr. King, reprinted from the Christian Science Monitor, Jan. 9, 2007:
Yes, 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, say that I was a drum major for righteousness.
     — Speech at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, 1968
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
     — Letter from Birmingham jail, 1963
     The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.
     — Strength to Love, 1963
     Nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon. It is a weapon . . . which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it. It is a sword that heals.

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