Brown County to celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. by revisiting the mountaintop | Green Bay Press-Gazette

GREEN BAY – The day before he was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his ground-breaking sermon “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” at the Mason Temple in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 3, 1968.

His speech scaled humanity’s own Everest, stretching from Ancient Egypt to Birmingham, Alabama, conferring with figures from Plato to Lincoln, underscoring social movements from the Emancipation Proclamation to the Memphis sanitation strike, the protest that brought him back to Tennessee. In the speech, King expressed his intentions to live a long, prosperous life. He looked ahead from the mountaintop with an eye aimed at the second half of the 20th century.

Although he was killed the next day, the mountaintop he touched remains for others to reach. And it’s part of the theme of the 28th annual Brown County Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration from 10:30 a.m.-noon Saturday at Northeast Wisconsin Technical College, 2740 W. Mason St. (UW-Green Bay is a planning partner.) “If you think about the physical mountaintop, you think about all the things climbers have to go through,” said Ingrid Parker Hill, a Green Bay resident who has been on the Brown County Martin Luther King Jr. Committee on and off for about 15 years. “They have to deal with the weather, the elements, they have to deal with their minds. But when we see the figurative mountaintop that Dr. King was thinking about, we have challenges and opportunities there as well.”

Read the full article via the link below.

Source: 28th annual Brown County Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration: mountaintop