In the month when we especially celebrate Black History, we are drawn to learn more about our personal heroes, like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. We know his more famous words, the ones we hear often. But a deeper look reveals a lifelong dedication to science and learning we hadn’t noticed before and one that resonates with everything we do.
Dr. King saw that the world was being transformed by technology and he urged us to never lose sight of the human component. He noted that the real power of humanity is not in our power to discover and innovate, but in the moral sensibilities with which we apply our learning.
“Through our scientific and technological genius we’ve made of this world a neighborhood,” he said. “And now through our moral and ethical commitment, we must make of it a brotherhood. We must all learn to live together as brothers—or we will all perish together as fools. This is a great issue facing us today. No individual can live alone; no nation can live alone. We are tied together.”
He was a powerful supporter of education, spending more than a decade studying at institutions of higher learning, and continuing to have a presence on campuses throughout his life. He engaged students in exercises in deeper thinking about education, cautioning that some “think that education should furnish them with noble ends rather than means to an end.”
In a campus newspaper in 1947, he wrote, “We must remember that intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education. The complete education gives one not only power of concentration, but worthy objectives upon which to concentrate. The broad education will, therefore, transmit to one not only the accumulated knowledge of the race but also the accumulated experience of social living.”
Education, he lamented, is used by some to pursue only exploitive, profit-making ventures.
Dr. King called on the medical community specifically, to cure itself of discrimination evidenced by “the most notorious expression of segregation. Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health is the most shocking and the most inhuman because it often results in physical death.”
He called on all of us to reach out and learn from each other’s experiences, something we take very seriously at Reina Imaging.
Dr. King’s words and example urge us today to be our best selves. “We are not responsible for the environment we are born in,” he said, “Neither are we responsible for our hereditary circumstances. But there is a third factor for which we are responsible namely, the personal response which we make to these circumstances. And so the challenge which confronts all of us is to respond to our circumstances with strength and courage rather than with weakness and despair.”
