MID-HUDSON – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day is a national holiday to commemorate the birth of the civil rights leader and what he stood for.
Ray Harvey, the president of the Newburgh-Highland Falls NAACP, said the day is meant to reflect on Dr. King’s mission in life and how people today can continue to fulfill it without the divisive culture that has developed in recent years.
“So that we can get out of our own way, get in our heads and serve people who might not look like you, who might not think like you, and that was his whole thing,” Harvey said. “He wasn’t just for a certain type of people, he was all the people, and we need to get back that. I think we have lost that somehow. We need to find that mojo that they had when everybody came together to fight for the civil rights movement of the time.”
Tyrone Wilson, Ulster County Human Rights commissioner, said “unity” is the word that needs to be shouted out loud on a daily basis.
“Lack of unity has been very loud forever; it has been a loud thing,” he said. “What has been quiet is ‘love’. Love has been a whisper; unity has been a whisper. We need to stop whispering that and we need to be just as loud as those who are stating that hate amongst anybody.”
Both Wilson and Harvey put much of the blame on the spreading of hate in the country on former President Trump with his brand of language.
