MLK Day 2019: A Call to Action for SSW
“First, we are challenged to develop a world perspective. No individual can live alone, no nation can live alone, and anyone who feels that he can live alone is sleeping through a revolution. The world in which we live is geographically one. The challenge that we face today is to make it one in terms of brotherhood.”–Martin Luther King Jr., “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution,” National Cathedral, Washington, D.C., March 31st, 1968
On MLK Day, we remember his legacy of revolutionary struggle for human rights for all people and how much more there was to his work and his ideas than the “I Have a Dream Speech” that we all know a few sentences from:
So I’m going to provide you five speeches that I think you should listen to /read today besides that I have a dream speech or I’ve been to the mountaintop speech. You need to know more about MLK than cliches from racists.
— ProfB (@AntheaButler) January 21, 2019
In that spirit, we also want to feature some important work done by one of our very own, my co-editor-in-chief Dr. Leticia Villarreal Sosa for the International Journal of School Social Work, the open-access journal that just published its 3rd volume at the end of 2018. As part of our ongoing 2019 Open-Access Project, we feature the editorial she wrote for the 3rd volume with her MSW student colleague, Ms. Raylinn Nuckolls entitled, “School Social Workers: A Call to Action in Support of Human Rights.”
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To date, we have published articles at IJSSW from school social work researchers working all over the world, including in Uganda, Germany, China, Canada, and the United States. We need your help to build the best open-access school mental health journal in the world. Here’s our standing Call For Papers that you can find on our site, in case you want to join us and share your research and practice perspectives in 2019.
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Please read our journal, share it widely, and consider using your research and practice expertise to help us build the “Beloved Community” that inspired MLK after returning from a trip witnessing nonviolent activism in India:
The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community, so that when the battle is over, a new relationship comes into being between the oppressed and the oppressor.
I left India more convinced than ever before that nonviolent resistance was the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom. It was a marvelous thing to see the amazing results of a nonviolent campaign. India won her independence, but without violence on the part of Indians. The aftermath of hatred and bitterness that usually follows a violent campaign was found nowhere in India. The way of acquiescence leads to moral and spiritual suicide. The way of violence leads to bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers. But the way of nonviolence leads to redemption and the creation of the beloved community.–The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.
