They could not take your pride

In the US, this is the MLK holiday weekend, on what would have been King's 75th birthday, and the Martin Luther King Center in Atlanta is honoring Bono tonight for his humanitarian activities. The Atlanta paper wrote an article on Bono's pilgrimage to the Ebenezer Baptist Church ("As a student of nonviolence, this place is a Mecca,") commenting that Bono had read many of King's sermons.

One of the seminaries I attended was the BU School of Theology, at which MLK did his doctorate, and we always had a kind of proprietary sense about him. We even had an icon of him in the small chapel upstairs. He was part of what got BUSTH nicknamed "the School of the Prophets," and every day walking in to seminary classes we had to pass the King sculpture, which is right on a major Boston thoroughfare. (In fact, if you continue several blocks down this thoroughfare, you will come to the Paradise Rock Club.) The plaza with the King sculpture is a sort of central point for the entire university, enough that there is even a webcam of it (Marsh Chapel with sculpture in front, seminary to the left, Charles River and Cambridge behind the chapel.)

The day after the Gulf War started in 1991, I got off the Green Line and walked across the street to see the entire King statue area on Marsh Plaza covered in hundreds of melted candles of every possible color and size from the spontaneous vigil the night before. It's my favorite MLK-related BU memory.