On King and Living A Life Beyond Fear
From The Huffington Post: We were planning a march to stop the governor from turning a public, historically black university, Mississippi Valley State University in Itta Bena, into a prison. Byron De La Beckwith had just been put in prison for killing Medgar Evers -- the NAACP's field secretary in Mississippi. It was 30 years too late, but the Ku Klux Klan was still enraged that one of their own had been sentenced to prison for killing a black man. They threatened to kill me or one of the other organizers in retaliation.
As the march approached, the threats became more numerous and specific. One night, in the cauldron of that long moment, I remembered something my parents often told me as a child: "We all get scared. The question, son, is how you respond. If you act in response to your fears, you are a coward. If you act in spite of your fears, you are courageous."
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