Leslie Jackson's Reading | Poverty Initiative Chapel Service
Leslie Jackson's Reading
Poverty Initiative Chapel Service
Moday, February 8, 2010. 12:00 pm.
James Chapel
Union Theological Seminary
The Declaration of Independence was valuable to Dr. King because there within the text he found the words by which the government must become accountable and the words by which we can hold the government accountable.
In his I Have a Dream speech during the March on Washington in 1963 he drew upon those themes of accountability and again four years later in May of 1967 at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference Staff retreat he returned us to those valuable words when he said:
We read one day, 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.' But if a man doesn't have a job or an income, he has neither life nor liberty nor the possibility for the pursuit of happiness. He merely exists.
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A New and Unsettling Force: Reigniting Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign - the Poverty Initiative's newest original publication is 
