The Fierce Urgency of Prophetic Hope

  ©Wendell Griffen 2024 Little Rock, Arkansas   On April 4, 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. called on the United States to lead the world in what he termed “a radical revolution of values” during a speech at Riverside Church in New York City when he urged the United States to end its war in Vietnam. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling…homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of peoples normally humane, of sending [people] home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in t

  ©Wendell Griffen, 2024 May 17, 2024 Little Rock, Arkansas   In recent days we have witnessed several public displays of hypocrisy by white politicians from Arkansas involving social justice. A statue of Mrs. Daisy Bates, a civil rights activist and journalist, was unveiled in Statuary Hall of the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C. White politicians extolled her courage, tenacity, and leadership that led to nine Black teenagers breaking the racial barrier and enrolling in Little Rock Central High School in September 1957. The same politicians are undermining everything Mrs. Bates stood for. They are actively looting public education funds to benefit private schools. They are falsely claiming that accurate instruction about the history of systemic racial injustice in this society is “indoctrination.” That’s a two-sentence summary of the political hoax called the LEARNS Act that Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders and the Republican super-majority of the Arkansas legislat