SIUSLAW NEWS ❚ SATURDAY, JANUARY 14, 2017
C ATHERINE J. R OURKE
For the Siuslaw News
G
rowing up in the civil rights
era, the airwaves resounded
with the refrains of Martin
Luther King along with the Beatles
and Bob Dylan. “The times they were
a changin’…” in the summer of 1967
when I stumbled upon a book that
would change my life forever. Its pro-
found words called for every
American to uphold democracy by
asking critical questions to ensure
equal rights for all people.
We must come to see that an edifice
which produces beggars needs
restructuring. It means that questions
must be raised about the whole
American society. We have a task,
and let us go out with a divine dissat-
isfaction. Let us be dissatisfied until
from every city hall, justice will roll
down like waters...
“Where Do We Go from Here:
Chaos or Community?” was Martin
Luther King’s final book advocating
for social justice and a sense of hope.
As a benchmark for democracy, it
reinforced the intrinsic value of every
individual as King championed those
on the lower rungs of the economic
ladder.
There is nothing to prevent us from
paying adequate wages to school-
teachers, social workers and other
servants of the public charged with
the responsibility of guiding our
future generations. There is nothing
but a lack of social vision to prevent
us from paying an adequate wage to
every American citizen whether he be
a hospital worker, laundry worker,
5 A
Remembering the dream...
maid or day laborer...
I was only a teen but became smit-
ten with King’s prose instead of
Beatles’ songs and began to ponder
his intriguing questions: Why is it
that people pay water bills in a world
that’s two-thirds water?
King’s book cited references from
Henry George’s “Progress and
Poverty” and Jacob Riis, a social
reform journalist whose muckraking
treatises exposed poverty in the
slums of New York. These captivat-
ing passages provoked me to write
about King’s premises for the school
paper.
My socioeconomic report, the first
story I ever published, appeared in
March 1968. While it arched some
teachers’ eyebrows and drew yawns
from my peers more interested in dat-
ing than social reform, it did receive
a Quill & Scroll Award for high
school journalism. Thus, a modern-
day muckraker was born.
Three weeks later, King was assas-
sinated while campaigning for strik-
ing trash collectors. New York erupt-
ed in racial violence where I rode the
subway to school in terror of maraud-
ing gangs. Carrying King’s book for
protection, I clung to his words:
I have decided to stick with love,
for I know that love is ultimately the
only answer to mankind’s problems...
King was gone but his message
had inspired a career in social justice
journalism. The reality of my first job
revolved around mundane weather
reports, police blotters, obituaries and
bridal columns for the “women’s
pages” instead of exposés. But I
would keep asking King’s tough
questions.
The opportunity arose during a
routine general assignment respond-
ing to an emergency call from an eld-
erly widow during a bitter subzero
cold wave. With a meager fixed
income, she couldn’t afford the utili-
ty bill and the power company had
shut off the heat.
Inspired by King, I probed and
wrote: “How does this happen in the
wealthiest nation in the Western
world?”
The Associated Press picked up the
story, which reached the desk of a
state senator whose outrage triggered
legislation protecting low-income
seniors from utility shut-offs in sub-
freezing weather. An ordinary story
in my backyard catalyzed social jus-
tice for thousands of people. I was
hooked and never looked back, trad-
ing high-speed chases for in-depth
analyses that posed King’s questions.
Investigative reporting didn’t build
a 401K but a treasure trove of social
justice triumphs instead. Over a 20-
year span, those reports won rights
for Chino miners and back pay for
striking shipyard laborers, helped
raise minimum wages and funds for
uninsured cancer patients, produced
shelter for the homeless and meals for
shut-in seniors, shed light on submin-
imum wages and immigration issues,
reduced an unjust jail sentence and
even saved lives through a “Truth in
Medicine” series.
Above all, each story, always
crowned with a King quote, opened
minds and hearts.
I later realized that social justice
journalism isn’t about exposing vice.
It’s about giving a voice to the “invis-
ible” people in our communities, the
ones who don’t write letters or show
up at town halls, and who often don’t
vote because they feel their lives
don’t matter. It’s about offering solu-
tions for positive change and carrying
King’s message of “infinite hope.”
When I began writing stories cele-
brating the contributions of firefight-
ers, teachers, volunteers, veterans,
nurses, cooks and dishwashers, I real-
ized the social justice dream of my
teens had finally come to fruition.
As I burnt toast with breakfast
waitresses, rode with trash collectors,
scrubbed toilets with janitors and
made beds with the hotel maids King
championed, together we answered
his vital questions.
What would King say to us now if
he was alive? I believe he would
remind us, in his timeless words that
seem written for the divine chaos and
current “winter of our discontent,”
that we are all one and that all lives
matter, including homeless ones.
True compassion is more than just
flinging a coin to a beggar. We must
rapidly begin the shift from a thing-
oriented society to a person-oriented
society. Unity is the great need of the
hour. We must combine the toughness
of the serpent and the softness of the
dove, a tough mind and a tender
heart...
Where do we go from here?
Social justice doesn’t require us to
become journalists, judges, labor
leaders, lawyers or legislators. It’s
about each of us tossing elitism aside,
standing by our truth and serving one
another despite our differences.
It means treating everyone with
kindness and compassion on the job,
the phone, the road; at the drive-
through and in the restaurant; on the
grocery line, online, at school and at
home. By choosing love, every per-
son becomes a hero and fulfills the
dream of Martin Luther King.
Everybody can be great because
anybody can serve. You don’t need a
college degree to serve. You don’t
have to make your subject and verb
agree to serve. You only need a heart
full of grace, a soul generated by
love...
Catherine J. Rourke is an
award-winning journalist who
writes about the “Extraordinary
People” of Florence.
Email her at
CJReditor@gmail.com.
VIEW FROM UPRIVER
Being true as a nation to what we put on paper
W ESLEY V OTH
For the Siuslaw News
I
was 11 years old, probably
working in a field near
Monroe picking pole beans
for two-and-a-half cents a pound,
on that August Wednesday of
1963. I would have ridden the bus
for an hour each way from where
my bike was parked a couple of
miles from my rural home in
Corvallis, making a few dollars a
day, when Martin Luther King Jr.
gave the speech for which he is
probably best known — speaking
of his dream.
His dream that, one day, this
nation would rise up to live out
the true meaning of its creed that
all men are created equal; and
that his four little children would
one day be judged not by the
color of their skin, but by the con-
tent of their character.
We did not have television, did
not take a newspaper, and my par-
ents listened to news on the radio
out of our hearing because my
siblings and I were frightened by
much of what was happening in
those days spent on the brink of
nuclear war.
So it wasn’t for a couple more
years that I heard the name of the
man who would do more to make
me a patriot and engage me in
service to my country than any-
one ever has.
Four years later, the spring of
my ninth-grade year, Martin
Luther King Jr. came out publi-
cally against the Vietnam War,
making him a villain among some
of my teachers — but even more
the hero in our church.
I began to read about him in
news magazines, and things that
he had written were available at
my Quaker Meeting. When I first
pricked up my ears to his words,
he was talking about poverty, not
race. He talked about workers rid-
ing for hours on buses to make
just a few bucks doing work that
was considered beneath the digni-
ty of the rich; he was talking
about young men who were being
drafted to go fight in a place
thousands of miles away before
they even had a right to vote.
He was talking about my world.
I had not witnessed much racial
tension, although I had seen
“Whites Only” signs in Portland
when I was small. But that sum-
mer of 1967, on the cover of Life
Magazine, I saw a photo of what
looked like a white police officer
shooting buckshot into the back
of a 12-year-old black boy, with
more of those photos inside the
magazine.
A friend of mine and I cut those
photos out and put them up on the
wall of his garage bedroom where
I would see them frequently for
the next several years.
We added war pictures and
those of peace marches. In my
pre-television days, those photos
were especially powerful.
When King was assassinated,
we were incredibly upset. I began
to read more, and to be moved by
his words and nonviolent resist-
ance methods, as well as the civil
disobedience which resonated
with my religious training and
values.
I wanted to be able to return
love in response to hate, even
though it was very hard to do, and
slowly I began to be able to live
out the things I believed and
wanted to embody. When I
became a fifth-grade public
school teacher in Hawaii, it was
part of King’s famous speech that
I assigned to be memorized by my
students rather than Lincoln’s
Gettysburg Address; it made a lot
more sense to my students than
what I had stumbled over as a stu-
dent at that age.
This past week, I have been lis-
tening to some of King’s speech-
es, sermons and lectures. There
are many available on the Internet
that I had never heard before. I
find them moving still.
And relevant.
Especially his still-to-be-heed-
ed charge that it’s time as a nation
that we live up to the words that
we put down on paper — the
Declaration of Independence, and
Constitution with its Bill of
Rights.
The most moving speech I
came across, and the one I find
most relevant to me as an old
white man in 2017 near the end of
his life, is one he gave to a group
of black junior high students in
1967.
The points in his “What is in
your life’s blueprint?” speech are:
1. Have a deep belief in your
own worth; in your own signifi-
cance; and that you matter.
2. Determine to achieve excel-
lence; find your life’s work and
be ready to go through the doors
that are open to you.
3. When you decide what
you’re going to do, do it well.
4. Be committed to the eternal
principles of Beauty, Love and
Justice. Don’t allow anyone to
pull you so low that you hate
them; don’t let anyone cause you
to lose your self-respect so that
you do not struggle for justice.
5) You have a responsibility to
make your nation a better nation
in which to live, to make life bet-
ter for everyone.
6) You must be involved in the
struggle for freedom and justice.
7) Do not give yourself to
things that will not solve our
problems.
These work for me as my reso-
lutions as I turn 65.
Because another thing I share
with Martin Luther King Jr. is a
birthday.