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This is an archived USAID document retained on this web site as a matter of public record.
Remarks of Ambassador Harriet Babbitt, USAID Deputy Administrator
at the Interagency Observance of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Birthday
January 12, 1999
On behalf of the U.S. Agency for International Development, I am delighted to welcome all of you to this interagency celebration of the life and teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Our world needs his message of healing, non-violence and reconciliation -- from Kosovo to Sudan, and wherever people are suffering because of religious, ethnic, racial or tribal differences.
This decade has brought an end to many long, and violent confrontations -- first in South Africa and most recently in Northern Ireland. Yet, clearly, the capacity of human beings for bigotry and cruelty has not been exhausted.
I remember the first time I heard Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech. I was a teenager in South Texas in that summer of 1963 -- far from the crowds at the Washington Monument and far from the Southern battlegrounds of the Civil Rights Movement. Yet his message was equally pertinent in the Rio Grande Valley, where prejudice and discrimination were more likely to be directed at Mexican Americans than at African-Americans.
I was deeply moved when I heard Dr. King say, "I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
We are privileged to have one of Dr. King's grown-up children join us today as our keynote speaker.
I am sure that Dr. King would be proud to have this son who bears his name also now bear the responsibility of continuing the fight. Yet that fact is itself an acknowledgement that we have not achieved the nation -- or the world -- that Dr. King dreamed of.
After Hitler's Holocaust in the 1940s, the world said, "Never again." Yet half a century later, we witnessed genocide in Rwanda and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia.
Speaking last March to genocide survivors in Kigali, Rwanda, President Clinton declared that, "At the dawn of a new millennium there is only one crucial division among the peoples of the Earth....It is the line between those who embrace the common humanity we all share and those who reject it....It is the line between those who give up their resentment and those who believe they will absolutely die if they have to release one bit of grievance."
Our speaker today learned early about suffering and loss, about what it was to have his home threatened and attacked, his father and then his grandmother killed by assassins' bullets. Those bullets tried to kill the dream of his father and of all people of good will and hope.
But he and his family rose above bitterness and retribution. He and his brothers and sisters grew up to embrace their father's dream -- and to carry forth the message of freedom and reconciliation to new generations.
We see the results of that long struggle for human dignity and opportunity in classrooms and schoolyards, in churches, synagogues and mosques, in homes all over this nation. I am proud that USAID is an important part of America's efforts to reach out around the world -- to heal and help, to promote peace, human rights and human opportunity.
I have had the privilege of seeing firsthand how much our nation's healing efforts have meant -- as recently as last November, when Americans responded with overwhelming generosity to devastating hurricanes in Central America and the Caribbean. I have seen that hope in Eastern Europe, where we are helping courageous people there establish democracies, human rights and the rule of law.
I have seen it in the faces of women whose lives were transformed by microenterprise loans of a few hundred dollars. I have seen it in the faces of students from Broadmeadows School in Massachusetts who -- inspired by a Pakistani child laborer -- built a school for child workers in Pakistan, and helped get factories to stop the dangerous exploitation of children. Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream did not die.
I see it in the faces of the children here today from Bailey's Elementary School for the Arts and Sciences. They are exciting proof that families from more than 40 countries, speaking more than 20 different languages, can come together to give their children hope and opportunity. The dream is alive -- in Fairfax County, Virginia, in South Africa and South Alabama, in Bosnia and Boston.
Poet William Butler Yeats said, "In dreams begins responsibility." The dream is part of our legacy as Americans -- as is the responsibility to keep the dream alive.
I am delighted to be here today to hear more about how Martin Luther King, III is guiding us all in keeping that dream alive.
Thank you.
This is an archived USAID document retained on this web site as a matter of public record.
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Last Updated on: July 12, 2001 |
