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Pastor Pushes Attendees to Realize Martin Luther King’s Dream in Powerful Remembrance Service

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“What would [Martin Luther King, Jr.] say about what’s going on in the world today?” asked Dr. Lindsay E. Curtis, a pastor at Norwalk’s Grace Baptist Church, as he addressed a crowd gathered in New Canaan on Monday morning to remember the late Reverend and civil rights leader. One of two first-hand witnesses of King’s iconic “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington to speak at the community’s annual service, held at the United Methodist Church, Curtis passionately reminded attendees that King’s presence in history is inherently political, and that, should the divide ever-present in today’s landscape ever be bridged, his legacy must be celebrated and upheld not only on his birthday, but year-round. At the center of Curtis’s speech, delivered during a remembrance service sponsored by the Interfaith Council of New Canaan, was a passage from King’s 1963 open letter, written from Birmingham Jail after his arrest. The quote reads as follows; “History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere … He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it.

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‘Handle Your Situation’: Stirring Sermon, ABC House Student Address at MLK Day Service

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In important ways, race relations in the United States in recent years recall the nation’s civil unrest of the 1950s and ’60s—the years during which Dr. Martin Luther King became most active, a New Canaan High School senior said Monday morning. After wrestling with issues such as police brutality and domestic terrorism, “from the Trayvon Martin case of 2012 to what took place in Ferguson [Mo.], Charleston and Dallas over the last three years, the country has an increasing desire to put such tensions to rest,” Rajon Mitchell, an ABC House of New Canaan student, said during a special service at United Methodist Church. “To sum up the issues of the ‘60s and today in a quote by Dr. Martin Luther King himself: ‘People fail to get along because they fear each other, they fear each other because they don’t know each other, and they don’t know each other because they have not communicated with each other,’ ” Mitchell told more than 200 people gathered at the South Avenue church for an annual “Service of Remembrance” on Martin Luther King Day. “While it is true for both eras, there is one thing that separates this day from the 1960s, and that is the means of communication. In an age where the entire world is your audience when you post something online, we have an opportunity to build bridges between communities, in an era where communities and cultures that may never have known that each other existed 350 years ago now know are able to connect and share in a cultural fusion.

Around Town

‘We Can Do It’: ABC Alumnus Leads Stirring MLK Day Service in New Canaan

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Reading the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “The Other America” speech put Jason Michael Land in mind of something that his grandmother used to say. A 2003 New Canaan High School graduate and ABC student here in town who has since gone on to Yale Divinity School, Land on Monday morning recalled that she would say “God made us all in his image—not some of us black and inferior, not some of us white and superior.”

“Believe it or not, I learned this lesson here, in New Canaan, the ‘Next Station To Heaven’ ” Land told more than 200 people gathered inside United Methodist Church on South Avenue for an annual service in remembrance of King. “Now I would be lying if I said that it was easy, because it definitely was not. However, I did find that I am no better nor worse than anyone else. I did learn that I have a mother and brothers and sisters who look nothing like me, but who will support and defend me to the very end.